[Dovecot] Home directories

[Brandon Lamb]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> I've noticed that a lot of people are using e.g.:
>
> mail_location = maildir:/var/vmail/%d/%n
>
> Then either they don't have home directory set, or their home directory
> is the same as the maildir. http://wiki.dovecot.org/VirtualUsers/Home
> explains all the problems of not separate home and mail directories.
>
> Also whenever I try to suggest using a separate home and mail directory,
> the answer is way too often: "But I'm using virtual users. (They don't
> have home directories.)"
>
> So I started wondering. Maybe simply renaming the "home" to something
> else would help here at least some. Make all of the documentation use
> only the new word, and add alias for userdb so that the new name and the
> "home" both work (I guess docs would need to keep using the "home" as
> field name for some more years).
>
> So far I've only come up with "vhome" as the replacement name. Other
> ideas?

Id like to share my experience that I just went through Sunday.

Four years ago I took over as sysadmin, and one of the things I did
was clean up our mail system. One of the decisions I made was to get
rid of what at the time seemed like an unnecessary extra folder called
".maildir" in every user's directory, which was only mail. So I moved
all data to just /mail/domain/initial/username and that seemed to be
great.

Now however, I am wishing I never did that. I seem to be having issues
giving /mail/domain/initial/username as the home and maildir:~/ as the
maildir (per user userdb mysql etc).

So I started a new quick project to move back to having a maildir
folder in the user directory, also so I could then migrate to mdbox by
having an mdbox folder there. Well on Sunday I had a mixup and i set
all my user's home's to maildir:~/ which had a side effect of *moving*
my entire domain folder to a different location, all 468 gigs of it
and I thought it had all been deleted, total panic attack and a good
two hours of going WTF and wanting to cry since my backup had also
started running at the same time so I was missing all kinds of stuff
on my live backup server, and to top it off, my third incremental
backup server had a bad drive so that was totally flaky.

Anyway, I learned two lessons here. 1) Dont procrastinate fixing your
backup server even if you have a third and think its not a big deal at
the time and 2) I wish I would have kept the "maildir" folder in the
user's "home" directory, even if they are virtual users.

On a side note, I happened to find my domain's mail directory and
successfully merged it back with only minor noise from customers
noticing. Good thing it was a sunday and the fair was in town.

/rookiemove FTL