June 2006 - dovecot - dovecot.org

Re[2]: [Dovecot] dovecot can't start!
by Oleg D. 02 Jun '06

02 Jun '06

MB> Hmmm... I was seeing a problem rather like this with 1.0beta8 under Solaris MB> with Sun's compiler: only it was with the IMAP protocol rather than POP. MB> The problem there was an assumption Tio had made that everyone was using a MB> C99-compatible compiler. Apparently this handles some aspects of variable MB> initialisation differently from earlier C compilers. MB> In my case adding a command-line option to the C compiler to flip it into MB> C99 mode seemed to solve the problem. The option for our compiler was MB> "-xc99" -- however if your compiler has such an option it may have a MB> different name. If you check the manual page for your C compiler you may MB> find an equivalent option to try. MB> However another solution was provided by Timo in the form of a simple patch MB> that made changes to a couple of source files. I hope Timo doesn't mind: MB> I'm re-sending his patch as an attachment to this message as it is tiny. MB> You could try applying it and rebuilding Dovecot. MB> Cheers, MB> Mike Brudenell But I use FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE-p15 with native compiler. Really nobody has this problem on freebsd? And the main - Why I can't start dovecot without SSL :) Why I see in log "pop3-login: BUG: SSL initialization parameters not given while they should have been" even if I have "ssl_disable = yes" in dovecot.conf 1.0b3 works fine. This problem is main for me because I don't want to use SSL. -- Best regards, Oleg mailto:dzoleg@rsute.ru

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[Dovecot] Duplicate Attachments....
by Charles Marcus 02 Jun '06

02 Jun '06

Love Dovecot, many thanks for it! But, I have a question regarding the storing of emails, with respect to efficiency... Our business model (advertising industry) is such that our users exchange a lot of emails with attachments - most less than a megabyte, but some considerably larger. Consequently, I have been looking for a good, open source imap server that doesn't store multiple copies of the same attachment - but instead, stores a checksum, and whenever a message is stored with a duplicate attachment, the attachment is stored only once, and simply referenced by some kind of link to other emails. This would *drastically* reduce the storage requirements for our company - imagine a message with a 10MB attachment, sent to 40 of our users, sometimes more than once. Now multiply this by 3 times per day, for 5 years... Are there any plans for Dovecot to support this type of storage in the future? Does this require the use of an SQL DB for storing the message components? -- Best regards, Charles

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[Dovecot] Platform change, considerations?
by Peter Lindgren 02 Jun '06

02 Jun '06

Hello! I am switching hardware platform for my dovecot 1.0beta3 installation. From Sun Sparc (SS4) to Intel i386. OS platform will only change from OpenBSD 3.7 to 3.9. From Dovecot 1.0beta3 to beta8. Is there anything special to consider, in terms of endianness or other incompatibilities? I plan on a fresh install (compile) on the new machine, migrate the settings manually (by hand), test the new server and then migrate old mail. Can I just mount the disks and copy, or should I go through NFS to be safe from potential endianness problems? Or perhaps copy with IMAP using my Thunderbird client? The live switch (the old server is in production) isn't that delicate, several hours downtime is OK. There's a backup server that can receive any mail I might loose during downtime, which can be copied though IMAP later. Thanks for any input! /Peter -- Peter Lindgren, dataingenjör E-post: peter "at" norrskenkonsult punkt com http://www.norrskenkonsult.com

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[Dovecot] Outlook causes BIG dovecot index problem (beta 8, outlook 2003)
by Casey Allen Shobe 01 Jun '06

01 Jun '06

Hey all, Well, I typed up all the below, then managed to fix the problem before sending this to the list. I'll send it anyways, in case anybody else is affected by it (and because it does indicate a definite bug in Dovecot's experimental Kerberos support). The fix is to recompile without kerberos enabled, and to take gssapi out of the auth methods in the config (the latter alone may or may not be enough of a fix on it's own, I didn't try it without recompiling). I'm guessing that Outlook attempts to use Kerberos authentication by default or something and silently fails and uses other auth methods, and that any attempt to use Kerberos is in fact what hoses the server. However I have not done any further testing against beta8 with a Kerberos-enabled client such as KMail, so I leave this as an exercise for the next adventurer. I'm also uncertain as to why this problem does not manifest on our main servers, which also have Kerberos enabled (and Outlook 2003 clients). Or /had/ anyways, as I'm disabling Kerberos support as we speak as a preventative measure. Here's the problem description: I've been running dovecot happily for many months on our production mail servers hosting about 600 accounts, with no problems. People use every mail client under the sun - Apple Mail, Outlook 97|2000|XP|2003, Outlook Express, Mutt, Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail, Eudora, and other esoteric things with no problem. So today I installed a new mail server on a client site dedicated to their domain. The MTA is exim, running with almost the same configuration we use on our main servers. The dovecot.conf is 100% identical. No mail was moved by hand to the new mail server - to migrate we copied the mail setting up the old and new accounts in Thunderbird and dragging things over (just to rule out that possibility, we have also tested using brand new empty accounts to reproduce the issue). Everything is golden using Thunderbird - email is send, and shows up in the inbox immediately. Enter Outlook 2003 (SP1): It shows all folders and mail fine. It sends mail fine. Nothing shows up in the inbox. At this moment, Thunderbird also stops receiving new mail in the inbox. I check the server, and there's a mail sitting in the /new directory in the maildir. Not only that, but suddenly NONE of the accounts on the box show any new mail, exhibiting the same signs. I tried a variety of things, including 'sync', removing all the dovecot* index files in the maildir, and restarting dovecot (being sure to killall imap before bringing it back up). Sometimes, these steps would magically cause everything to work again, until I did a mail poll in Outlook which causes the problem to re-occur. Other times, these steps didn't seem to do anything. A couple times, for no apparent reason, without doing anything, mail would show up. Too hopeful, we sat around for 30 minutes sending more mail to an account and then just idling...nothing showed up. The hardware is good, we've compiled a full glibc and gcc just to ensure that there are no CPU/memory issues, and this box has a solid good history behind it in it's prior uses. Until Outlook is used, everything works fine. We do have the outlook-idle workaround enabled, and tried both with and without delay-newmail, which didn't make any difference. Cheers, -- Casey Allen Shobe | cshobe(a)seattleserver.com | 206-381-2800 SeattleServer.com, Inc. | http://www.seattleserver.com

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[Dovecot] mbx to mbox conversion
by Marc Perkel 01 Jun '06

01 Jun '06

Here's a feature I'd like. If Dovecot opened an MBX format file that it would convert it to an MBOX format file. I have several files that I'm having a hard time converting. The one I got from Washington University WUIMAP is extremely flawed.

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[Dovecot] Cannot remove Maildir folder
by Marcin Deranek 01 Jun '06

01 Jun '06

Hi, I have been using dovecot 1.0 beta 8 on Debian Sarge for a couple of days and I experienced some problems when removing folders.. As an IMAP client I use Thunderbird 1.5 and IMAP folders are on NFS. Here are the steps to re-produce the problem: 1. Run Thunderbird as usual 2. Create folder 3. Remove folder - In my case folder is not removed but moved to Trash (Thunderbird setting) 4. I go to Trash and remove it from there 5. Folder is removed but I get additional ..DOVECOT-TRASHED directory - next time it won't be possible to remove it Some more info: * Just before removal I run lsof to see which files are in use: bash# lsof /home/marcin ... imap 21360 marcin cwd DIR 0,15 344064 3307008 /home/marcin (filer:/vol/vol0/home/marcin) imap 21360 marcin 8u DIR 0,15 4096 4223651 /home/marcin/Maildir/.Trash.test/new (filer:/vol/vol0/home/marcin) imap 21360 marcin 9u DIR 0,15 4096 4223650 /home/marcin/Maildir/.Trash.test/cur (filer:/vol/vol0/home/marcin) imap 21360 marcin 11r REG 0,15 144 4223663 /home/marcin/Maildir/.Trash.test/dovecot.index (filer:/vol/vol0/home/marcin) imap 21360 marcin 12r REG 0,15 104 4223647 /home/marcin/Maildir/.Trash.test/dovecot.index.log (filer:/vol/vol0/home/marcin) imap 21360 marcin 13u REG 0,15 10272 4223657 /home/marcin/Maildir/.Trash.test/dovecot.index.cache (filer:/vol/vol0/home/marcin) ... There are more files in use but in this case I'm interested with PID 21360 which has opened Trash/test (the one which I'm going to remove) * Just after removal I see error message in Syslog: dovecot: IMAP(marcin): unlink_directory(/home/marcin/Maildir/..DOVECOT-TRASHED) failed: Device or resource busy Running lsof again gives the following: imap 21360 marcin cwd DIR 0,15 344064 3307008 /home/marcin (filer:/vol/vol0/home/marcin) imap 21360 marcin 11r REG 0,15 144 4223663 /home/marcin/Maildir/..DOVECOT-TRASHED/.nfs004072af0002cb1b (filer:/vol/vol0/home/marcin) imap 21360 marcin 12r REG 0,15 104 4223647 /home/marcin/Maildir/..DOVECOT-TRASHED/.nfs0040729f0002cb1a (filer:/vol/vol0/home/marcin) imap 21360 marcin 13u REG 0,15 10272 4223657 /home/marcin/Maildir/..DOVECOT-TRASHED/.nfs004072a90002cb1c (filer:/vol/vol0/home/marcin) Looking into some NFS docs we can read: "A client has a file opened. Another process on that client deletes the file. So the client NFS stack rather than deleting the file and potentially hurting the other process, it renames the file to .nfs<file_handle>." To me it looks like one imap process tries to delete .Trash.test directory (first rename and then unlink) whereas other imap process has still opened dovecot.* files. Any workaround/fix for that ? Regards, Marcin Deranek

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