September 2005 - dovecot

[Dovecot] what does this mean: Warning: Error in custom flags file / Corrupted Indexes
by rick tait 13 Sep '05

13 Sep '05

Hi everyone: I am seeing a whole LOT of these messages in my dovecot logfile: imap(rickt): Sep 12 17:14:03 Warning: Error in custom flags file / home/rickt/mail/.imap/TRASH/.customflags: Duplicated ID 0 imap(rickt): Sep 12 17:14:03 Warning: Error in custom flags file / home/rickt/mail/.imap/TRASH/.customflags: Duplicated ID 1 and also these: imap(mbwnews): Sep 12 17:10:16 Error: Corrupted index file /home/ mbwnews/mail/.imap/INBOX/.imap.index: used_file_size larger than real file size (2016 vs 1608) imap(mbwnews): Sep 12 17:10:18 Error: Corrupted index file /home/ mbwnews/mail/.imap/INBOX/.imap.index: used_file_size larger than real file size (2016 vs 1608) And not just referring to my inbox, other users as well. I hava bog standard install of 0.99.10.8, on an openbsd 3.6 box. every now and then i get an error from my or my users' IMAP email client saying that it couldn't access a particular inbox. a few clicks of "OK" or "Cancel" etc and the problem seems to go away. all kinds of errors (similar to above) in the imapd logfile though, seem to correspond with the timing of the abovementioned IMAP mail client errors. one thing: my users DO use procmail, so there is a chance that their IMAP client might have a mailbox open that procmail may be trying to append to. i wonder if this is a locking issue? i guess what i'm asking is - 2 thing: 1) how can i get these pesky imap client errors to go away so my users mailboxes can be successfully selected? 2) what do the indexing errors mean? are the 2 things related? Thanks so very much in advance everyone! Best, Rick. rick tait | e: rickt(a)rickt.org | t: 323.829.5703

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[Dovecot] Changing location of dovecot.conf file
by Andy Cravens 12 Sep '05

12 Sep '05

I've been looking through the configure options and can't seem to find a place to specify where dovecot.conf lives. I want the default location to be in /etc and not under the dovecot install directory tree. -- Andy

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[Dovecot] An alternate "dovecot-auth" daemon using cyrus-sasl
by buc 12 Sep '05

12 Sep '05

We use dovecot in a heterogeneous environment (Windows/Linux desktops and Linux servers). For unified authentication we use a sheaf "Samba/Openldap" (i.e., Samba NT domain with openldap backend and pam/nss_ldap for Linux). Windows users are authenticated well everywhere, but there is one old issue. As "SPA" (NTLM) against NT domain is not supported by dovecot, it is necessary to use default "plain" method. In addition to security problems, it does also a problem of password unification. Each time a user changes the password, he should do it one more time for the mail program. I know that dovecot supports NTLM, however against local database only (not for NT domain controller). In early versions support of cyrus-sasl (which supports NTLM now) had been incorporated, however it like not work and now is removed. Fortunately, there is a possibility to substitute dovecot-auth executable. Therefore I have tried to make an alternate variant of dovecot-auth, which supports all that we need. For us, it seems to be more useful to create an auth daemon using cyrus-sasl, rather than to add domain support to existing ntlm code. First of all, it is easier for implementation. Besides it enables use of all mechanisms supported by cyrus-sasl (present and future), including GSSAPI. Anyway, it will be the useful additive to dovecot. I have made appropriate patches for both dovecot-1.0-stable and dovecot-1.0.alpha1. The idea is to copy "src/auth" to "src/auth-cyrus", strip all unneeded from newly created directory and add cyrus-sasl support. The resulting code probably looks not so elegantly as if it has been written separately, however this way allows to not make a lot of things from the scratch. The patch against 1.0.alpha1 is here: http://dmitry.butskoy.name/dovecot/dovecot-1.0.alpha1-cyrus.tar.gz . To be more readable, it is not a flat patch (due to a lot of whole files add/remove). It is a tarball with 3 files: a list of files to initial copy from auth/ to auth-cyrus/, a patch for resulting tree, and a script which automates this steps (:-)). (The script should be run in the root of the main source, i.e. a dir with src/ and doc/ subdirs). I already have successfully tested this patch with PLAIN method. However before testing of other methods, it would be desirable that somebody have looked at it. Whether someone could check up my patch (just fluently having read), at least for obvious bugs and typos? Dmitry Butskoy <Dmitry(a)Butskoy.name> Saint-Petersburg, Russia Red Hat Certified Engineer 809003662809495

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[Dovecot] Dovecot feature request: move /var/mail/uid to INBOX
by Steffen Kaiser 12 Sep '05

12 Sep '05

Hello, UW-Imap has a (questional, but for me useful) feature to slurp all mails pending in /var/mail/uid into the user's INBOX whenever the user successfully logs on and the INBOX is not configured as /var/mail/uid. The usefulness for me is that users have a relatively small quota, so the noisy "over quota" messages pop up for everyone now and then, regardless how frequent one reads the mail. When I now set a large quota for the "pending INBOX", where the user (aka dovecot) can only delete mails from, I circumvent those messages, prevent that users use the (large) INBOX as yet another place to pile up data (the user does not know about the pending INBOX at all) and let the users have "full" control over their folders. The disadvantage is that it works for "real" users only. Another disadvantage is that one would expect "LDA"-features in the server portion of Dovecot, e.g. Sieve :-), or the server would need to spawn the Dovecot-LDA somehow. (Next thing is that, currently, the mails are delivered into the home directory of the users, what leads to several annoyances when someone is away for some time and finds his home directory locked, because the mass of mails locked the directory. Mostover, those IMAP servers I ran so far didn't allowed the user to delete a mail via IMAP often, because some temp or arbitary file couldn't created in the IMAP root. Because the user is already logged on onto Dovecot, there should be less problems deleting mails when the quota exceeds while slurping them in. At least I had extremly good experiences with this mechanism, when I used UW-Imap and the INBOX was located as mbx in the user's homedirectory.) Bye, -- Steffen Kaiser

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[Dovecot] Authenfication on 2 databases
by LeeJaY 12 Sep '05

12 Sep '05

Hello, I have 2 databases MySQL. I would like to do that: If the user does not existe in the first base, it goes in the second database. my configuration auth default { mechanisms = plain passdb sql { args = /etc/dovecot-sql-1.conf } passdb sql { args = /etc/dovecot-sql-2.conf } userdb sql { args = /etc/dovecot-sql-1.conf } userdb sql { args = /etc/dovecot-sql-2.conf } } but it don't work, my version est 1.0.alpha1 if you not understand this message, i am sorry, my english is bad

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[Dovecot] reading subfolders with mail.app
by Patrick Galbraith 12 Sep '05

12 Sep '05

Hi all, I have been having a hard time using Fedora Core 4 with dovecot +sendmail. Namely, I cannot read my home dir's procmail filtering dir (where I have some subfolders) in ~/mail. I cannot create mailboxes either. I'm wondering if this is a client issue, and whether I need to switch to Maildir, which I'd like to do, but don't know how to with sendmail (with postfix, it's a piece of cake). Any advice on what my problem is? I'm all ears! regards, Patrick

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[Dovecot] 1.0alpha2 released
by Timo Sirainen 12 Sep '05

12 Sep '05

Changes: - Some cache file corruption fixes (shouldn't be any left?) - Some index file fixes with mmap_disable=yes - Some mbox syncing fixes - Timezones in mbox From-lines were handled wrong - Added pop3_reuse_xuidl setting. Patch by Chris Wakelin - "stack frame changed" crashfix for FETCH BODYSTRUCTURE - Added %R (reverse string) and %H (hash string) variable modifiers. These can be useful if you want to automatically split users to multiple partitions (eg. %3RHu gives values 0..2 based on the given username). See doc/variables.txt for more information. The POP3 bug mentioned in ChangeLog doesn't actually exist, so don't be alarmed by it :)

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[Dovecot] variable expansion in dovecot.conf?
by OpenMacNews 11 Sep '05

11 Sep '05

hi all, does dovecot.conf support the definition/use of user variables? e.g., in principle, my_DIR = /path/to/something/ then, default_mail_env = maildir:${my_DIR}/%d/Accounts/%1u/%u/Maildir or, for that matter, default_mail_env = blahblah then, namespace private { ... location = $default_mail_env ... i finallly figured out -- through randon thrashing -- that the simple "$" format has been causing me grief ... and, cursory searching has not dug up anything (yet) in the man/wiki/etc. possible? reference docs for it? thx! (ack to my margarita for now ...) richard

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[Dovecot] Do index files need removing when upgrading 1.0-stable to 1.0-alpha1 or later?
by Chris Wakelin 11 Sep '05

11 Sep '05

Hi Timo, Just a quick question: do index files still need removing when upgrading from 1.0-stable (as in the testXX series) or will Dovecot regenerate them automatically? I'm expecting to go with 1.0-stable on Tuesday for my 20,000 users (as that's what I've been testing), but if we see lots of index issues, I may want to upgrade to alpha1 (or later) fairly soon afterwards and it would be annoying to have do delete thousands of indexes! Best Wishes, Chris -- --+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+- Christopher Wakelin, c.d.wakelin(a)reading.ac.uk IT Services Centre, The University of Reading, Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439 Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094

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[Dovecot] 1.0alpha1: stack frame core
by Jeff A. Earickson 11 Sep '05

11 Sep '05

Hi, Today's core dump from 1.0alpha1 came from a syslog message of: IMAP(user): pool_data_stack_realloc(): stack frame changed gdb info on the resulting core dump attached. Question: how many people are building/using dovecot 1.0alpha1 with gcc 4.0.1 versus gcc 3.4.x? I am wondering if these issues come from the compiler instead of dovecot itself? Jeff Earickson Colby College

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