[Dovecot] Home directories

[Romer Ventura]

I use: mail_location: maildir:/srv/mail/vmail/%Ud/%Ln/Maildir

No problems at all. I went this way because i use templates to deploy  
new VMs, once running i only have to change the network config on the  
new VM and add a new virtual disk to it. The disk size depends on the  
service and data needs. I guess i could have mounted the vdisk into / 
home/vmail instead of the directory above.

Thanks
------
Romer Ventura

On Aug 24, 2010, at 10:46 AM, Brandon Lamb wrote:

> 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