[Dovecot] Question regarding Postfix and Dovecot

[Timo Sirainen]

On 17.3.2013, at 18.11, Daniel <cryptodan at gmail.com> wrote:

> First of all the wiki articles on dovecots site are poorly written compared to apache and postfix.

It's the best I can do myself. I have no idea how they could be improved in any major way. They say that the software developer himself is the worst possible person to write its documentation, because he can't understand what others find difficult..

> That is what I mean by lack luster the error logging is lack luster as it doesn't specify the file or the line error is on like many very well supported applications like apache and postfix and that makes dovecot not very user friendly.

If there is a syntax error, Dovecot shows the file and line number. After that it should always mention the setting name that is causing trouble, which I'd think should be easy to grep from the configs.. I guess it could be useful to show the file+line for it, but that's quite a lot of code to add just to avoid a grep. It's also a bit tricky to do without wasting more memory (wasting memory in config / doveconf process is fine, but not elsewhere, and some settings won't get processed until later).

> I owe no one an apology for stating my opinion and I have over 10 years of using open source software and dovecot is the application that I have used that given me such headache and grief to the point I have given up on this learning experience. 

Quickly browsing through this thread, I guess this is the main problem? :

Mar 15 06:56:37 andromeda dovecot: lda(cryptodan): Fatal: setgid(8(mail)
from mail_gid setting) failed with euid=1000(cryptodan),
gid=1000(cryptodan), egid=1000(cryptodan): Operation not permitted (This
binary should probably be called with process group set to 8(mail) instead
of 1000(cryptodan))

Yes, this is something I've been annoyed at for a long time. But it's also not easy to make that error any better, except maybe by creating a wiki page explaining the whole thing and linking to it. (There are a ton of mails about this exact thing in Dovecot list archies.) There's also no setting that is specifically related to this (the problem is a mismatch between Dovecot/Postfix configuration). There is a super easy solution though: use LMTP instead of LDA, and there are no permission troubles. Maybe that's what the LDA wiki page should say.. Done: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/LDA