September 2006 - dovecot

[Dovecot] Maildir messages owned by Root.
by Simon 05 Sep '06

05 Sep '06

G'day I am having an interesting issue, that I can not find a fixe for. I am running dovecot 1.0 rc7, on a Freebsd 5.4 x86 box, with around 1500ish users, using Maildir storage format. I have a very small number of user, with the same problem, when messages are moved from ~username/Maildir/new to ~username/Maildir/cur a random number, of the files ownership, will change to root. And my users can then not download any mail until this has been fixed. I have an identical setup running on Solaris 10 x86, that does not have this problem. Has anybody come across this before on Freebsd or any other operating system. Or have any suggestions, on what I can try to fix the problem. I have not been able to emulate it in a lab environment, and the logs on the server do not produce an error.

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[Dovecot] OT: NIS Authentication
by Jeff Graves 04 Sep '06

04 Sep '06

Ran into a major issue with my setup overnight: We have a Win2K AD domain running SFU with a master and 1 slave NIS server. Our mail server is a FC1 box that runs dovecot and a MailScanner/sendmail config. The mail server is configured as a NIS client. The problem is that we lost power overnight and all of the boxes shutdown after the UPS's ran out of battery. After the power came back on, all of the boxes automatically rebooted. The problem is that our mail server is somewhat faster than the rest of the servers. It booted up before the master or slave NIS servers were up and running. Since the mail server uses a PAM NIS authentication scheme, it knows nothing about our users unless it connects to a NIS server. So, this morning users were getting "unknown username" type errors with outlook. Furthermore, the mail logs show that sendmail was rejecting mail with "unknown user" errors. It wasn't until we rebooted the mail server and it was able to reconnect to the NIS servers that mail resumed being received and users could access it. It seems like a fundamental problem with our setup. Since I'll eventually be updating the box to a newer OS and configuration, I need to plug this hole somehow without changing the authentication scheme. Furthermore, I'm concerned that if the master or slave went down while the mail server was still up, we'd see similar results. I'm thinking of one of two options to fix this but wanted to run it by everyone to see if there was a better way: 1) Configure the boot loader to wait 5 minutes before loading the OS (it uses GRUB so I'll set it display the OS menu screen for 5 minutes and then boot). Then if I'm doing maintenance to the box I can just hit enter to boot immediately and hopefully the 5 minute delay will allow the other boxes to boot after a power outage. This won't cover me if it's not a power outage (Eg. The master or slave dies). 2) Configure the mail server as an NIS slave. I'm thinking that this will basically "copy" the user info (username, password, homedir, etc.) on a schedule and store it locally on the mail server (is this how it works?). This covers both issues - power outage and a server dying. But I've read about problems getting password sync to happen quickly. I'd ideally like it to happen immediately (without any manual intervention) but I don't think this is possible. Thoughts? Jeff Graves, MCSA Customer Support Engineer Image Source, Inc. 10 Mill Street Bellingham, MA 02019 508.966.5200 - Phone 508.966.5170 - Fax jeff(a)image-src.com - Email www.image-src.com

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[Dovecot] Can't build with PAM support
by Neil Briscoe 04 Sep '06

04 Sep '06

I'm having trouble getting dovecot to compile with PAM support. Output from the configure command says its checking for pam_start in -lpam .... no. I've checked, there is a pam_start in there. So how can I force configure to see what its looking for? I've tried the --with-pam switch and that doesn't work. I'm trying to build the latest RC7 on a Debian Sarge box. Regards Neil ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Scanned for viruses, spam and offensive content by CensorNet MailSafe Professional Web & E-mail Filtering from www.censornet.com

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[Dovecot] Emails corrupted...
by Jean-François Guyet 04 Sep '06

04 Sep '06

Hi All, I have just setup a Dovecot Imap server on a Ubuntu 6.06 Lamp box. Basically I use fetchmail to retrieve emails from foregin pop accounts and then procmail transfers emails for /var/mail/username to ~/Maildir/new and other folders. Everything works fine *except* if my Thunderbird client is connected (I haven't tried any other client). If an email is received while TB is connected, then the file for the email is empty (eg size 0) leading to an empty email dated 1/jan/1970!. As I'm quite to Dovecot (and Linux in general), I'm quite a bit lost. Anyone there who could help ? Best regards Jean-François -- ----- Fin du message transféré ----- --

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[Dovecot] Mailbox Limnits
by Chris Kenward 04 Sep '06

04 Sep '06

Hi Folks Can anyone tell me whether there is a default limit on the size of IMAP mailboxes using Dovecot or, if not, where I would set that up? We're wanting to give our customers the choice of IMAP vs POP but don't want to end up with Gigabyte mailboxes. Regards Chris

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[Dovecot] SPA (NTLM) Authentication
by Neil Briscoe 03 Sep '06

03 Sep '06

Hello I have just spent a happy day (!) configuring Exim4 to accept authenticated connections from full blown Outlook clients. That works. Unfortunately, by ticking the "Use SPA" box in Outlook it now demands SPA on the POP3 server as well. The existing POP3 server doesn't support this style of authentication. I believe Dovecot will. We're already using it as an IMAP server. What I'm worried about is diverting its current view from /etc/passwd. I have an /etc/exim4/passwd file which contains three fields for the users tested so far, their name, an encrypted password, and a clear text one. Timo has already told me that the system needs access to the cleartext password (or an NTLM style password) in order to work. It would be nice if I could have the system check the /etc/exim4/passwd file and if the user wasn't there then check the /etc/passwd file - and ignore NTLM as it would normally. Regards Neil -- Neil Briscoe Adelix Ltd neil.briscoe(a)adelix.com web: www.adelix.com tel: 0845 230 9592 / fax: 0845 230 9591 / main office: 0845 230 9590 snail: The Old Post Office, Bristol Rd, Hambrook, Bristol BS16 1RY. UK. skype: stonefish001 Adelix Ltd is BS EN ISO 9001:2000 Certified (No. GB 12763) Any views expressed in this email communication are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of a member of Adelix Ltd. Adelix Ltd. does not represent, warrant or guarantee that the integrity of this communication has been maintained nor that the communication is free of errors or interference. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Scanned for viruses, spam and offensive content by CensorNet MailSafe Professional Web & E-mail Filtering from www.censornet.com

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[Dovecot] Dovecot with STARTTLS
by Dovecot Mailing List 03 Sep '06

03 Sep '06

Dovecot rc7 I have Dovecot working fine with using SSL on port 995. However, if I attempt to use STARTTLS on port 110, I receive the following error message from my MUA: >>> Connecting to "192.168.0.2" (SSL/TLS) [9/1/2006 5:36:12 PM] <<< +OK Seibercom.net at your service [ISafe POP3 Proxy] STLS +OK Begin TLS negotiation now. The connection then times out. This is the only entry in the Dovecot.log: dovecot: Sep 01 17:36:52 Info: pop3-login: Disconnected: Inactivity: rip=192.168.0.4, lip=192.168.0.2, TLS handshake Does anyone have an idea what the problem might be? Thanks! -- Gerard Seibert gerard(a)seibercom.net

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[Dovecot] imap fails, policy wrong?
by rob＠adeed.tele.com 02 Sep '06

02 Sep '06

up until a week or so ago, I had no problem using IMAP logging into a server running Fedora Core (I think 4 or 5 ) with dovecot 1.0. Had used squirrelmail and other mail agents using IMAP with no problem. as of 2 days ago, I get a squirrelmail error "ERROR: Connection dropped by IMAP server. Query: CAPABILITY" and turning on dovecot debugging shows the following: audit(1157176740.621:14111): avc: denied { search } for pid=9431 comm="doveco t" name="rob" dev=dm-0 ino=23560377 scontext=user_u:system_r:dovecot_t:s0 tconte xt=user_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t:s0 tclass=dir can someone point me in the right direction? apologies if this doesn't contain enough info, will try to get more if necesssary, thanks in advance. (incidentally, the simpler dovecot error message says it can't chdir to my $HOME or its parent, but I see no problem with perms or ownership. ) Rob Lingelbach rob(a)colorist.org

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[Dovecot] Passwd-file extra-fields ...which ones
by Luis Venegas 01 Sep '06

01 Sep '06

Hi list., >From http://wiki.dovecot.org/AuthDatabase/PasswdFile I can tell there is mail and allow_nets fields. Which ones dovecot supports? In particular one for quota?? Thanks Luis Venegas

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[Dovecot] DIGEST-MD5 doesn't work
by Jürgen Herz 01 Sep '06

01 Sep '06

Hi, my dovecot installation works since months and clients authenticate using CRAM-MD5. But today I got the first chance to test an client that supports DIGEST-MD5 - and it doesn't work. Because of lack of other supporting clients and servers I'm now at the point I don't know which side is to blame. The error I get after the client answers the servers challenge is "-ERR Authentication failed: Missing nonce parameter". Though I don't know how DIGEST-MD5 works I wonder about the message because the clients answer contains a nonce parameter (captured with tcpdump): YXV0aHppZD0ib3RycyIsY2hhcnNldD11dGYtOCxjbm9uY2U9IjFlOTZkYmZiZWEwZjUxNmVhZjEyYmM0NjU1M2JmZjVlIixkaWdlc3QtdXJpPSJwb3AzL25hbm8iLG5jPTAwMDAwMDAxLG5vbmNlPSJPVGpGWmhjS2FIVjZSVGMyZlRDTXJ3PT0iLHFvcD1hdXRoLHJlYWxtPSIiLHJlc3BvbnNlPTVmMTQyZWVlN2FmMWVmYTJhYWI5ZmM0ODNiOGJjOTJhLHVzZXJuYW1lPSJvdHJzIg== authzid="otrs",charset=utf-8,cnonce="1e96dbfbea0f516eaf12bc46553bff5e", digest-uri="pop3/nano",nc=00000001,nonce="OTjFZhcKaHV6RTc2fTCMrw==", qop=auth,realm="",response=5f142eee7af1efa2aab9fc483b8bc92a,username="otrs" Client is a Perl script using Net::POP3 and Authen::SASL Modules Dovecot is version 0.99.14 - I know it's old and not supported. If one tells me the bug is known and fixed in 1.0rc, then I'll think about upgrading, but I just to test I don't want to change my running system. Regards, Jürgen

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