[Dovecot] installing dovecot on Mac OS X

[Alan Schmitt]

* Timo Sirainen (tss at iki.fi) wrote:
> On 20.10.2004, at 17:13, Alan Schmitt wrote:
> 
> >I installed dovecot using darwinports. The version installed is
> >0.99.10.5. (It's running well enough to tell me that when I do a:
> >sudo /opt/local/sbin/dovecot --version
> 
> That's pretty old version.

The numbers looked close to the version announced on the front page, so 
I did not worry too much about this. (I just upgraded, as I explain 
below).

> 
> >Before trying to tweak the configuration file, I wanted first to get
> >dovecot to run. When I first launched it, it told me that there was no
> >dovecot user. After searching for a while, I finally found how to 
> >create
> >one (and a dovecot group as well), doing the following:
> >
> >sudo niutil -create / /groups/dovecot
> ...
> 
> Looks difficult, I think I just used the GUI tools :)

Well, I just switched to Mac OS X (from Gentoo Linux), or rather I am in 
the process of switching. So I googled for the way to add a user, found 
these, and just used them (I did check in NetInfo that it was correct, 
though) ;-)

> 
> >zsh: bus error  sudo /opt/local/sbin/dovecot
> 
> Crashes for some reason. I'd suggest trying newer Dovecot version. I 
> know the latest 1.0-tests work, although after configure you'll have to 
> remove HAVE_MADVISE-line from config.h to avoid warnings about 
> madvise() failures.

Thanks for the hints, I just did this and it works. Thanks a lot.

I have a couple other questions:

- What authentification method would you recommend? OS X does not keep 
  the users and passwords in /etc/passwd, so I'm using passwd-file 
  method at the moment. I'm wondering how good a choice this is.

- I would like to do the following (as described in 
  http://mutt.sourceforge.net/imap/):
  <quote>
  1.2.1.3. Using a tunnel to your IMAP server
    If you set the configuration variable tunnel, mutt will attempt to 
    run it as a shell command and treat the process as a pipe to an IMAP 
    server, instead of connecting through a normal network socket. Note 
    that the hostname, port and SSL options are ignored when tunnel is 
    set, they are used only to display the mailbox name.

    Also note that your tunnel command has no way to interact with the 
    terminal, so it can't, for example, ask you for a password. If you 
    try to use an SSH tunnel with something like

      set tunnel="ssh -q mailhost /usr/libexec/imapd" 

    you'd better make sure that you don't need a password, probably by 
    using ssh-agent. Otherwise you are likely to get a "Broken pipe" 
    error when SSH dies.
  </quote>
  however I could not find a imapd to call directly. Is this possible 
  with dovecot?

- I see that the maiboxes created under the Maildir directory are of the 
  form .INBOX and .Sent. Could it be possible (maybe using namespaces, I 
  have not really understood how they work) to store them without the 
  leading dot?

Thanks again for helping me with this. I've been struggling with Imap 
servers for a couple days, and it's the first one I really get working 
(I'm only testing with mutt, as I'm sshing into the Mac, but I'll test 
with Mail.app next).

Alan Schmitt

-- 
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.
.O.
..O
OOO
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