[Dovecot] Dovecot MTA

[Larry Stone]

On Nov 10, 2013, at 1:00 PM, Daniele Nicolodi <daniele at grinta.net> wrote:

> On 08/11/2013 14:07, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> I've never really wanted to create my own MTA, because I like Postfix
>> quite a lot. And I always thought it would require a horribly lot of
>> time to be able to create something that was anywhere even close to
>> having Postfix's features.
> 
> Hello Timo,
> 
> I don't want to put too much stop energy into this, and I'm not really
> in the position to tell you what to do with your time and energies, but
> I feel that the world does not need another MTA, and that most of your
> design goals can be very well accomplished with existing tools or
> minimal extensions to them.
> 
> At the same time I see here on the mailing list frequent reports of bugs
> in Dovecot that would have been quite easy to catch with more test
> coverage. Spending time and energies into extending unit and integration
> tests for the current Dovecot would IMHO be very well worth.

I totally agree. I'm fairly new to Dovecot and am already quite cautious. Frequent new versions that always seem to have lots of bugs. Compare that to Postfix which has very infrequent new versions although lots of "snapshots" that are intermediate versions for those who want to test or really, really need a new feature.

This shows in the amount of traffic the Dovecot list generates compared to the Postfix list.

> Additionally I feel that Dovecot documentation can see some love as
> well.  Having the wiki as main source of documentation does not look
> very polished, compared, for example to the extremely good written and
> maintained Postfix documentation.
> 

Agree here too. IMHO, the Dovecot documentation has become disjointed due to the feature creep that has made it into Dovecot.

As I said in a post back in March:
"All of this said (and much of it not worth repeating), one problem that seems to affect all software as it grows is that as documentation is "patched" to describe new features, it becomes too complex for the new user who just wants to do something simple to figure how to do that simple stuff. For the user who has been along for the long ride since the software started, it makes sense but the new user is overwhelmed. Rewriting documentation is no easy task but it can help for someone to take a look at it the way a new user might who knows nothing about the software.

I don't know the history of Dovecot but my guess would be the Dovecot LDA was added after the Dovecot POP/IMAP server component. Why? Because the www.dovecot.org Overview says "Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 email server for Linux/UNIX-like systems" without any mention of the Dovecot LDA anywhere on that front page. Longtime users know about the Dovecot LDA but they rarely read that first page and it's harder to notice something is missing than it is to notice something is wrong."

Timo said in his reply that he doesn't know how to improve the current documentation. I'll take him at his word. I submit that it really needs a total rewrite, not continued editing. And before someone suggests if I believe it needs to be rewritten, I should offer to do it myself, I will just say that I don't know anywhere near enough about Dovecot to do that. I use a very small subset of Dovecot's capability (I started with it as a drop-in replacement for UW-IMAP; other than Dovecot's authentication module, if UW-IMAP didn't do it, then I don't use that feature in Dovecot) and have no experience with the Dovecot LDA. 

-- 
Larry Stone
lstone19 at stonejongleux.com
http://www.stonejongleux.com/



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