September 2003 - dovecot

[Dovecot] Debian bug #201444: More verbose logging
by Jaldhar H. Vyas 03 Nov '03

03 Nov '03

I brought this up a while ago but the submitter is wondering if there has been any progress on this issue. He says: It would be extremely nice to have a little bit more detailed logging, and I believe it doesn't really require that much code. I use now a daemon which logs login (name, ip; as dovecot does), and logout (with name, logout reason if any special) with the numbers of "read new mail number and size" and "mail left on server number and size". Would be nice to have something like that in dovecot. Could something like this be added for the next version? -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar(a)debian.org> La Salle Debain - http://www.braincells.com/debian/

3 4

[Dovecot] Why does dovecot confuse mutt?
by Amelia A Lewis 04 Oct '03

04 Oct '03

Heylas, I just switched my primary mail server from courier imap to dovecot (I've been waiting to do this; dovecot showed up in debian testing for alpha, at last). So, using the same set of maildirs, there are slightly different behaviors. First, of course, dovecot displays the hierarchy as I thought it ought to be, such that INBOX is a sibling of all other top-level boxes, not the parent of everything. This is A Good Thing[tm]. That works as expected. However, as far as mutt is concerned, *every* mailbox has child folders. My muttrc contains the line: set folder=imap://localhost/. (and the home folder is set to imap://localhost/INBOX; the idea is to do all mail munging through the server, never directly touching the maildirs with an MUA). Oh, and I'm using maildir (~/Maildir). In mutt, from the currently-selected mailbox, one can use 'c' to change boxes, and ? displays a navigable folder hierarchy. If a folder contains only mail (no child folders), it shows up as "FolderName", if it has child folders (whether or not it has mail), it shows up as "FolderName.". You can display the mail in a folder that has child folders, but it requires a different keystroke than the default (enter selects a folder, which means showing child folders if there are any, showing mail if there aren't; to display mail in a folder that has child folders, space). This is tripping me up a little, because of course the commands are mostly bred into my fingertips, and it's a difficult adjustment. I hit return, and I see a folder that contains the "child" folder "../". Is this a glitch in mutt's handling of information that I ought to report to mutt maintainers? Is it a glitch in dovecot's presentation of information that I ought to report to ... err, well. *laugh* My other primary mail client seems to cope beautifully with the information that's supplied (sylpheed, if it matters). But then, sylpheed also coped perfectly when courier was supplying information. I gather that courier and dovecot are reporting something slightly different, somehow, but I don't really know what, and I don't know which should be considered "correct". Amy!

5 5

[Dovecot] mailbox sorting issue
by Paul 04 Oct '03

04 Oct '03

Thanks for the "junk at end" help. Now I'm having one more perplexing issue: When I sort a Dovecot mbox in Pine, the most recent messages tend to linger near the bottom of the message list, regardless of how they're sorted. Here's a snippet of the bottom of the list, sorted by arrival time: 448 2003-09-24 20:31 sprightly@e... Re: *hoopoe 449 2003-09-24 21:05 mlescaut@w... Re: yes! 450 2003-09-24 23:57 jackulysses@y... Re: oh my lord 451 2003-09-25 01:43 sprightly@e... attachments==take a look 452 2003-09-25 01:29 avantguild@m... Your Membership is Almost Up 453 2003-09-25 10:40 heidi@p... xhtml 454 2003-09-25 11:04 dembo@s. Re: bridge 455 2003-09-25 11:54 JKesner@m... Bombay 456 2003-09-25 12:05 cm2144@c... Re: bridge at linda's And here is a snippet of the same mbox list, sorted by From address: 449 2003-09-25 01:43 sprightly@e... attachments==take a look 450 2003-09-10 16:06 staff@c... Tribute in Light Shines 451 2003-09-08 18:44 starpiekat@y... Re: Sorry! 452 2003-09-23 22:01 starry@p... but... 453 2003-09-25 12:05 cm2144@c... Re: bridge at linda's 454 2003-09-17 17:07 wahrman@s... RE: bridge etc. 455 2003-09-19 13:11 wahrman@s... RE: bridge etc. 456 2003-09-15 23:39 waycross@u... waycross - the eagle Notice that message from cm2144 in both lists, way out of order in the second! I'm not 100% sure that this is a Dovecot issue, but I suspect it is, since this doesn't happen if I open the same mailbox locally or with UW-IMAP. I know that Pine makes use of IMAP server-based sorting if it is available. I tried deleting .imap-index* files, just in case, but that didn't help. thanks, Paul

3 2

[Dovecot] can't read attachments using javamail with dovecot
by Jonas Bosson 03 Oct '03

03 Oct '03

Dear folks, this might be a java-bug, but it seems to occur only when connecting to dovecot-IMAP. UW and Cyrus-ditto works, while when I try to read attachments (base64), I get slapped in the face with this: java.lang.NullPointerException at com.sun.mail.iap.Response.parse(Response.java:99) at com.sun.mail.iap.Response.<init>(Response.java:68) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPResponse.<init>(IMAPResponse.java:31) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPResponse.readResponse(IMAPResponse.java:105) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPProtocol.readResponse(IMAPProtocol.java:153) at com.sun.mail.iap.Protocol.command(Protocol.java:215) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPProtocol.fetch(IMAPProtocol.java:882) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPProtocol.fetch(IMAPProtocol.java:874) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPProtocol.fetchBody(IMAPProtocol.java:677) at com.sun.mail.imap.IMAPInputStream.fill(IMAPInputStream.java:74) at com.sun.mail.imap.IMAPInputStream.read(IMAPInputStream.java:105) at com.sun.mail.util.BASE64DecoderStream.decode(BASE64DecoderStream.java:143) at com.sun.mail.util.BASE64DecoderStream.read(BASE64DecoderStream.java:54) at se.illuminet.httpd.mail.MailXMLService.serviceXml(MailXMLService.java:361) This occurs in booth javamail 1.2 and 1.3(.1) using dovecot. Of course this unfriendly/unhandled response is a problem with javamail while biting the dust. Further analysis points to that the reading works OK up until 2^16 bytes, so it fails either in reading the tail of the attachment or resuming after the first buffered data is consumed. I tried the BODYSTRCUTURE-patch (booth #1 and then #2), but it didn't help. Now I am fresh out of ideas. The java-bug has a three week delay to surface on "bug-parade". But I still have to explain why it works in UW/Cyrus and not with dovecot. Next step would be to add trace-lines in dovecot. Any ideas? /Jonas

2 6

[Dovecot] Handling of X-Status flags
by Bernard Blackham 29 Sep '03

29 Sep '03

Hi all, I've done a bit of searching and haven't seen anybody else coming across this problem yet: I noticed that Dovecot uses the opposite flags for marking messages as deleted and draft to most other MUAs I've seen or used: With PINE, mutt and uw-imapd at least, messages are marked with X-Status 'D' for Deleted, and 'T' for drafT. Dovecot reverses this behaviour, using 'D' for Draft, and 'T' for Trashed. Was there any reason behind this? Or have I gone loopy? At our site, we have users reading mail with a mix of PINE locally, and through dovecot via WebMail and there seems to arise a bit of confusion between the two flags. Attached is a patch that reverses this behaviour (prepared against 0.99.10 but applies with a little fuzz to cvs). I'd like to hear people's comments on the issue... is it just me? :) Thanks, Bernard. -- Bernard Blackham bernard at blackham dot com dot au

2 2

[Dovecot] UIDPLUS?
by Keith Edmunds 29 Sep '03

29 Sep '03

Any plans to implement UIDPLUS in Dovecot? Keith

2 1

[Dovecot] Odd problem with dovecot segfaulting
by Tim Miller 29 Sep '03

29 Sep '03

Hi All, I installed dovecot on one of my servers the other day, and I want to use it in a vhosting environment. To this end, I have set it up to use password file authentication with a passwd file specified by me. This file will contain both system users and virtual accounts. To test it, I set up two accounts in the dovecot passwd file. One is a system user, I give his home dir in the correct field, along with the MD5 hash of his password in its field, and everything seems to work OK (he can login, read mail out of /var/spool/mail/user etc.). The seconmd account is a vhosted account, and I set the uid and gid to that under which the vhosting account exists. I did not set a home dir, but I set a mail dir in /var/spool/vmail/imap/vhost/user, and made this dir group writeable by dovecot. The user can login, but immediately upon authentication, dovecot segfaults (the log reports an "Internal login failure" and the authentication process is killed with signal 11, i.e. a segfault). Has anyone encountered this before? Is this even the right way to set up vhosting (I don't want to go with LDAP or SQL authentication right at the moment, but I may move to that later on)? Are there any things I should look for (this is probably due to something I've done wrong) or make dovecot be a bit more verbose in reporting errors to its log? Thanks in advance for any help. From what I've seen so far, dovecot looks like an excellent product. Best, Tim Miller

2 1

[Dovecot] pine and mozilla at the same time
by Gasha 26 Sep '03

26 Sep '03

Hi all, what is the best way to read e-mail from server using "pine" ?? I would like to use graphical IMAP client, mozilla for example. And sometimes run pine from shell. mbox or Maildir? Or maybe setup pine to use IMAP server on "localhost" ?? Gasha

2 1

[Dovecot] can't read attachments using javamail with dovecot
by Jonas Bosson 25 Sep '03

25 Sep '03

Dear folks, this might be a javamail-bug, but it seems to occur only when connecting to dovecot-IMAP. UW and Cyrus-ditto works, while when I try to read attachments (base64), I get slapped in the face with this: java.lang.NullPointerException at com.sun.mail.iap.Response.parse(Response.java:99) at com.sun.mail.iap.Response.<init>(Response.java:68) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPResponse.<init>(IMAPResponse.java:31) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPResponse.readResponse(IMAPResponse.java:105) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPProtocol.readResponse(IMAPProtocol.java:153) at com.sun.mail.iap.Protocol.command(Protocol.java:215) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPProtocol.fetch(IMAPProtocol.java:882) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPProtocol.fetch(IMAPProtocol.java:874) at com.sun.mail.imap.protocol.IMAPProtocol.fetchBody(IMAPProtocol.java:677) at com.sun.mail.imap.IMAPInputStream.fill(IMAPInputStream.java:74) at com.sun.mail.imap.IMAPInputStream.read(IMAPInputStream.java:105) at com.sun.mail.util.BASE64DecoderStream.decode(BASE64DecoderStream.java:143) at com.sun.mail.util.BASE64DecoderStream.read(BASE64DecoderStream.java:54) at se.illuminet.httpd.mail.MailXMLService.serviceXml(MailXMLService.java:361) This occurs in booth javamail 1.2 and 1.3(.1) using dovecot. Of course this unfriendly/unhandled response is a problem with javamail while it bites the dust. Further analysis points to that the reading works OK up until 2^16 bytes, so it fails either in reading the tail of the attachment or resuming after the first buffered data is consumed. I tried the BODYSTRCUTURE-patch (booth #1 and then #2), but it didn't help. Now I am fresh out of ideas. The java-bug has a three week delay to surface on "bug-parade". But I still have to explain why it works in UW/Cyrus and not with dovecot. Next step would be to add trace-lines in dovecot. Any ideas? /Jonas

1 0

[Dovecot] Multiple instances of .customflags staying open
by Ron 25 Sep '03

25 Sep '03

# cat /proc/version Linux version 2.4.20-18.9 (bhcompile(a)daffy.perf.redhat.com) (gcc version 3.2.2 20030222 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.2-5)) #1 Thu May 29 07:09:43 EDT 2003 # dovecot --version 0.99.10 I've just recently noticed a serious problem with my system. After about an hour or so I get errors in /var/log/maillog such as this; Sep 21 06:40:16 the-system imap(ray): opendir() failed with file \ \/home/ray/Maildir//new: Too many open files I investigated with 'lsof' and found that many copies of '.customflags' were open for each and every folder. ie; Each folder's '.customflags' file was open 15 times! I suspect that postfix is not able to store newly collected email while this is occuring, therefore I am likely losing messages. I've tried with multiple mail clients (Sylpheed & Evolution) and multiple users, always with the same result. Further investigation indicates that each time the client scans for new mail another instance of each and every '.customflags' is opened. As I have the client set for checking at five minute intervals then it was probably 75 minutes until the client barfed. Less, if I manualy scan for new mail a few times. If I shutdown the client and restart it then everything is fine for about an hour. Running 'lsof /home/ray/Maildir/.customflags' on the server I can see the list of files increasing each time the client checks for new mail. Any help would be appreciated!

4 14