August 2006 - dovecot

[Dovecot] Inconsistent handling of CRLF in APPEND
by Richard Birkett 02 Aug '06

02 Aug '06

One of the recent 1.0 commits relating to CRLF handling (maybe 2006-06-24) has changed the behaviour of APPEND when using mbox files with ordinary plain text emails. When a client stores a new message using an APPEND command (eg. saving a draft or copy of a sent message), it uses CRLF consistently as a line-ending throughout the literal data block over the wire - both for the header and the body. At least, this is what both Pine and Thunderbird do, so I suspect it's correct according to the IMAP specs, though perhaps there are grey areas around 8bit messages with no transfer-encoding. When Dovecot stores the message in the mbox file, it *used* to convert all the CRLFs to LF. Since the change, it is still converting the CRLFs in the header, but is leaving them intact in the body. The result is a weird hybrid format within the file. FETCH seems to undo the damage - at least, it sends back data with CRLF in both the header and the body - so provided the only access to the mail-store is through Dovecot, the clients are none the wiser. Dovecot also seems to handle existing messages (stored with LF only) OK too, and doesn't seem to be re-encoding them on update (eg. status changes). However, direct local access to the hybrid new messages will only work if the client is lenient about line endings: Pine seems OK, but others might not be, expecting an mbox file to be consistently "Unix" format. Is this a regression introduced while trying to fix the attachment corruption problem, or just a brand new bug?! Hopefully there is a way of reverting this change without reintroducing the attachment problem. Richard

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[Dovecot] Quota with dict backend - sql does not get registered
by David Jonas 02 Aug '06

02 Aug '06

Hello everyone, I've been working with the quota plugin, attempting to use the dict backend. It seems the sql dict class is not getting loaded. I dropped a couple lines in dict_class_lookup(dict.c) and it seems the only class that gets loaded is "proxy". Any idea how to get the sql driver to load in the quota/dict module? My authentication goes through the sql module and is working perfectly, so I know that the module and db are talking in general. I've scoured the documentation and dug through the code but I can't seem to discover the solution. There is "Dynamic SQL drivers" in the compiling from source section: http://wiki.dovecot.org/CompilingSource#line-158 I compiled the driver_mysql.so, copied it to lib/dovecot/, symlinked it into auth/, imap/, pop3/ and lda/, then tried-- but it still only showed "proxy" as being loaded. After that I added it to the mail_plugins list, mail_plugins = driver_mysql quota but it didn't like that and spat out some linking errors: Edlopen(/usr/local/dovecot-1.0.rc2/lib/dovecot/imap/driver_mysql.so) failed: /usr/local/dovecot-1.0.rc2/lib/dovecot/imap/driver_mysql.so: undefined symbol: sql_not_connected_result So, where do I go from here? Any insights would be appreciated and I'll keep digging. Regards, David

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Re: [Dovecot] Improving interaction/performance with Mail.app
by Sean Kamath 02 Aug '06

02 Aug '06

On July 1, Alan Schmitt wrote: >>>> What OS are you using in server side? And what filesystem? >>> >>> Mac OS X.4.7, with HFS+ as files system. >> >> I think I've heard before that Dovecot doesn't behave too great with >> OSX.. > >This might be the cause. I've had the plan to move my IMAP server to >a linux box, this might be the good time. > >> Hmm. I guess it's time to put this in wiki: >> >> http://wiki.dovecot.org/Debugging/ProcessTracing > >Good to know. I just need to find a way to reproduce the problem. > >Thanks a lot for your help, > >Alan I just moved to Dovecot. I'm looking forward to figuring out how to allow users to have access to (old) email in mbox format, an have all new mailboxes go to maildirs. . . But I digress. When we switched, no one complained of performance issues -- except myself. mail.app would seem to stall on caching a message, then report that it was reconnecting, and move a bit further, then stall. . . What apparently was happening was the dovecot was polling for /dev/urandom, over and over again, waiting for some random bits, and Mail.app would timeout and reconnect. Turning off SSL made it MUCH faster. Of course, that's not a solution. So, I hunted the mailing lists, and ran across some notes about dovecot using /dev/urandom a little too enthusiastically. I haven't had a chance to grub through the code (hard to do with a 2-year old that won't sleep until midnight on many a nights!), and this post is somewhat premature, but I'm curious if turning off SSL removes the problem. Of course, switching to a Linux server will (sort of) negate the problem, in that apparently Linux is a little faster at finding random bits (I guess, I've never looked into it). My server is Solaris 9. My client is Mail.app from 10.3.9. As I grub through the code, I'll try and identify cryptographically significant randomness from non-cryptographically significant randomness. Sean

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[Dovecot] server provisioning
by Steve Roemen 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

All, I was curious as to what size of systems (cpu, memory) that you are using. I'm going to build a new server for imap, imap-ssl, pop3, pop3-ssl, maildir storage (NOT smtp or spam --that's on another server) for ~500 users. What do you believe is the minimum for this? Thanks, Steve

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Re: [Dovecot] permissions warning on OpenBSD 3.9
by Geert Hendrickx 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 10:36:01AM +0200, Thomas Zajic wrote: > BTW my (command line) chmod doesn't know a "-h" option, what's it supposed > to do? Something with (not) following symlinks, I guess? from NetBSD's chmod(1) manpage: -h If file is symbolic link, the mode of the link is changed. But apparantly only NetBSD and FreeBSD have this flag, sorry. Geert

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