[Dovecot] Please help me resolve why mail isn't being delivered to virtual users

[Scott Silva]

on 1/11/2008 10:43 AM Andrew Falanga spake the following:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> There are a few things that I think I need to explain.  Far too many people
> gave me feedback after my remarks about the dovecot wiki for me to answer
> all individually.  At first, I must admit to some prideful need to lash back
> for not being understood.  This however, would be totally inappropriate and
> completely worthless.  Now, hopefully, I can articulate my thoughts without
> sounding prideful and egotistical (very hard to do without the added benefit
> of inflection when talking face to face).
> 
> My original statement that sparked this lengthy thread now was really born
> out of nothing more than my observation of documentation after working five
> years at HP as a programmer (not as an HP employee though).  I have seen,
> even from my own efforts of writing more documentation than I care to admit
> to, that inevitably there are things that become so common place to the
> person writing the doc that they don't even realize they are fundamental to
> understanding how things work.
> 
> Unfortunately, I used as an example, mbox and MAILDIR to make my point.
> Perhaps this was a bad choice because I felt this same frustration in
> reading other areas of the wiki.  It wasn't that the information was bad, or
> unusable.  I just had questions about how it all fit together for dovecot,
> and couldn't find the answers on the dovecot site.  I don't think it's
> unreasonable to ask that a particular software program explain how it's
> pieces fit together, or how it (the software program) is supposed to work
> with other pieces it makes use of but doesn't directly control.
> 
> Now, here comes the other problem.  I was in a crunch.  The church e-mail
> system had died, and a replacement was needed ASAP.  Originally, I should
> have had more than adequate time to find my answers.  Normally, I do spend
> much more time trying to find the answers myself.  (At this point, I can
> only ask you to believe that.)  I learned a painful lesson in this several
> years ago while learning OpenBSD.  I learned that I really did expect folks
> to take me by the hand and walk me through.  It's something that I've worked
> hard to overcome, and sometimes still struggle with.
> 
> I'm sorry that I reverted, to some degree, to this tendency with this whole
> dovecot endeavor.
> 
> I do have more than a rudimentary understanding of how mail works.  After
> all, I didn't ask everyone to explain IMAP, POP or SMTP to me.  Nor did I
> ask for an explanation for SSL/TLS or other things.  Further, I didn't ask
> any questions here for how to make sendmail do SMTP authentication.  Coming
> into this, I knew that SMTP was the MTA, things like sendmail and postfix
> did this, while other programs, e.g. dovecot; allow users to login and get
> mail from the server.  An interesting thing for me to ask myself is, "Why
> did I look up postfix on google, but not mbox?"  I didn't know what postfix
> was and did look that up on Google.  When trying to get things working, I
> was assuming that mbox and maildir was something dovecot implemented itself,
> not a standard of sorts that dovecot implemented from a standards outline.
> That's why I thought it strange dovecot didn't define what they did.
> (Perhaps even why it didn't dawn on me to Google the term.)  I must also
> mention that another respondent did give me a link in the dovecot wiki to an
> explanation of mbox and so on.  I missed that one when doing my research.
> 
> In short, I'm sorry that I gave the impression that I assumed dovecot
> developers and documentation writers should explain every little detail to
> me.  I do not think this, nor was I trying to persuade others that I did
> think this way.  My remark about a disclaimer was taken to an extreme I did
> not intend.  I do think disclaimers on every page is excessive is
> ridiculous.
> 
> In the future, I shall endeavor to look more heavily for the answers before
> posting, or at least before assuming that no one on this list is willing to
> help.  Thank you to all for the help given.
> 
> Andy
> 
Apologies back to you.
You unfortunately seemed to look like the ever increasing group of people that 
have been hitting the lists (at least the 7 or 8 I read) asking very basic 
questions and wanting someone to give them a complete cover to cover install 
guide, write and test their config files, and be available for whatever 
problems that might come up( Maybe a little exaggerated, but it has seemed to 
get that bad some days). All the while they don't want or are unable to do the 
basic admin tasks. Sorry again to lump you into that group.

In a crunch like that, why not grab one of the pre-built gateway distros like 
clarkconnect or sme server. Sure they aren't perfect for everybody, but you 
can get them up and accepting mail in less than an hour or two. I always keep 
a cd or two of them for an emergency. I like clark connect, but its free 
version is limited to 10 e-mail accounts. The negative to me on sme server is 
it's use of qmail as MTA. But they are complete, and quick to set up.


-- 
MailScanner is like deodorant...
You hope everybody uses it, and
you notice quickly if they don't!!!!