[Dovecot] Documentation

Enrique enrio at online.no
Mon Jul 18 21:03:25 EEST 2005


Hello,

I have added a few questions and answers to the wiki, about stuff that  
caused me long hunts when trying to set up dovecot with maildir storage.

Some of it I have gleaned from the source. Some of it is actually already  
documented, but I had not been able to spot it when I needed it.

At the time of writing I had a particular advantage: I did not know, or  
had mostly forgotten, the peculiarities of the imap protocol.  I say  
'advantage', because I think that when writing documentation it is  
important, yet difficult, to see things from the perspective of a user  
that is quite ignorant, although not stupid. These need the documentation  
most, and they are in majority.

(Some will say the "stupid" ones are in majority, but writing for them is  
almost futile anyway. Anyway, I doubt they are a majority; average  
intelligence is adequate for all normal tasks. What we often judge and  
condemn as "stupidity" is most often the result of a different perspective  
that _we_ are too limited to understand.)

Since I am not yet too spoiled, and yet recently had my hands (or rather  
my eyes) in the source, this may be a golden opportunity to produce some  
more documentation.

I therefore urge you to suggest what I should look at and write about.  Do  
you have any ideas about how the documentation should be organized? some  
questions are not strictly dovecot or even imap questions, yet they arise  
quite naturally for an administrator that is migrating to dovecot or to  
imap in general.

The existing migration documentation was not as usefull to me as it could  
have been because I was both migrating to imap from a non-imap solutions,  
and from mbox to maildir, both at the same time. That placed me in a  
particularly "ignorant" position.

It is quite likely that much of what I write is not exactly true. I have  
suggested procmail as a delivery agent for maildir stores, because it is  
the only one I know about at the moment. I just occurred to me that I have  
not even checked if /bin/mail (on GNU/Linux systems) can do it. Any ideas?

I have not (yet) found out anything about the CONTROL= part of the mail  
environment. Should I write something about it? Is it usefull for system  
administrators to know about it? What is it?

Regards
-- 
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