LDAP questions and hair pulling

Hi all, I've search google left and right. Search archive after archive for various tips using various search strings and I cannot for the life of me find an answer. Let me explain the situation. We have an LDAP directory that our users are stored in. It's not AD or Novell just plain OpenLDAP. A subsection of my tree looks like this: dc=domain,dc=com ou=People

    cn=John E. Vincent,ou=People,dc=domain,dc=com
       uid=foo
       mail=foo@domain.com
       password=bar

ou=Departments

    ou=IT
      cn=Intranet (groupOfUniqueNames or groupOfNames)

cn=John E. Vincent.... (alias to above ou=People entry) Now I've been doing LDAP authentication for quite some time in various apps through the ou=People,dc=domain,dc=com search base. My problem comes when I want access to be group based but I want the user to log in with his email address. All of our other web applications authenticate with webaddress. Now I have Apache authentication working against these groups for things like SVN and WebDav. Apache follows the alias through to look up the email address and password. Same for Postfix and Courier. I just can't seem to get the right option to work in PHP. I have a feeling it's my search filter but I don't know. For some reason I can't even get an filter using ldapsearch to work properly. Dear god, all I want to do is follow the alias and verify the entered email address and password for the entry (dereference it, correct?) =) Can anyone provide any good pointers? I swear I've hit EVERY single google result I could for this. I've even looked at the Net_LDAP package but it doesn't seem to work either. Thanks for any help that anyone can provide. John E. Vincent