July 2007 - dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] Slower than Courier-IMAP
by Nejc Škoberne 20 Jul '07

20 Jul '07

Hello, I have been running Courier-IMAP for while now, and I decided that I'd like to try Dovecot. This paper: http://student.iu.hio.no/~s132278/reports/disney_imap_maildir.pdf says that the performances are somewhat comparable, but my Dovecot "feels" slower than Courier-IMAP. I am using Maildirs and I have substantial amounts of emails in them. For example one of the folder has 26000 messages and to display a message it takes 6-7 seconds. Before it took only 2-3 seconds to display a message (in Thunderbird). I have tried to turn "fsync_disable" to yes, but the feeling is somewhat the same. What else can I try to tune? It's a FreeBSD 6.2 machine on a HP ProLiant ML350 with 2GB RAM and 120GB SATA disk and the Dovecot running in a FreeBSD jail. You can find my dovecot.conf here: http://pastebin.ca/627442 Thanks, Nejc

2 1

[Dovecot] Quota warning patch and config parsing in 1.0.2
by Doug Council 20 Jul '07

20 Jul '07

Dovecot 1.0.2 patches and compiles fine with the quota warning patch (http://www.dovecot.org/patches/quota-warning.patch) But, when parsing the configuration file , deliver now seems to strip all of the spaces in the QUOTA_WARNING environment variable, generating an error. This is the plugin{} section from my dovecot.conf: plugin { quota = maildir:storage=20480 quota_warning = storage=10% /usr/local/bin/quota-warning } And this is the error Dovecot generates for anyone with a quota: quota warning: No command specified: storage=10/usr/local/bin/quota-warning Doing a diff on src/deliver/deliver.c between 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 show some changes to how the config file is parsed, but nothing I can find that would cause the spaces to get stripped out of the configuration value. Has anyone successfully used the quota warning patch with 1.0.2? Thanks, -Doug

4 5

[Dovecot] telnet connection refused
by Neil Robins 20 Jul '07

20 Jul '07

I'm running Dovecot 1.0 with Postfix and Amavisd-new on FreeBSD 2.6-RELEASE. Mail was working OK until I put a new mailbox on but then it stopped. Dovecot appears to be running but it doesn't show up in "Top" nor when I run "ps -aucx". I also can't telnet to it on port 110 either at localhost or at the mail server (Connection refused). Can telnet to port 25 (Postfix) no problem. Any suggestions very much appreciated. I know this is an imap group but it's the only Dovecot group I could find. Thanks,

1 0

[Dovecot] fine-grained user authentication support
by Adam Jacob Muller 20 Jul '07

20 Jul '07

Hi, I'm wondering if it's possible to have some users restricted to only login via POP3 or only IMAP (likewise for IMAPS/POP3S). Returning a particular field with the userdb sql query (protocols=imaps did not work), perhaps setting up a different passdb? Is this possible with dovecot? -Adam

2 3

[Dovecot] errmsg question
by Stewart Dean 19 Jul '07

19 Jul '07

Am seeing: > Jul 19 14:59:19 mercury mail:err|error dovecot: IMAP(jab): dotlock /var/spool/mail/jab.lock was immediately delet > ed under us > Jul 19 14:59:19 mercury mail:err|error dovecot: IMAP(jab): file_lock_dotlock() failed with mbox file /var/spool/m > ail/jab: No such file or directory what does it mean, what should I be doing to alleviate or troubleshoot the problem? -- ==== Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 sdean(a)bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035

2 1

[Dovecot] sluggish updating of gnome mail-notification?
by Greg Troxel 19 Jul '07

19 Jul '07

Sorry if this is a repeat query. I am running dovecot 1.0.2 under NetBSD/i386 (3.1 and 4.0ish). I use maildirs, and deliver into them with procmail. For clients I use Gnus (CVS head) mostly and thunderbird, and also the gnome mail-notification status applet (4.0). Gnus fixed a bug in the last few months where exiting a group didn't unselect the folder and thus didn't necessarily push read marks back. Mostly everything works perfectly. When new mail arrives, thunderbird shows it as new/unread, gnus will find it with 'g', and mail-notification shows it as well. After reading it in gnus, when I exit the group (which pushes read marks to the IMAP server), thunderbird usually shows the message as read immediately, but often mail-notification waits for a while (up to about a minute) before withdrawing the new-mail notification. I just tried this and thunderbird was also slow in showing the mail read. marking the message read in thunderbird caused mail-notification to show the message as read, but with a 30s lag. mail-notification is supposed to use IDLE if available. Sometimes it withdraws new-mail claims at the right time. I know that I need to turn on debugging and trace all this. So I'm really just asking if anyone else has seen this or similar behavior.

2 1

[Dovecot] Performance question
by Stewart Dean 19 Jul '07

19 Jul '07

I now have Dovecot in production and things are apparently trouble-free. The one known problem is that initial client inbox load can take 30 seconds - 2 minutes. For instance: 'I got fed up waiting and went and got coffee'...this with a 3MB mbox inbox...and my mail server is a substantial machine consuming 25% CPU just for this person's IMAP session. I realize that a certain amount of performance piggishness is inevitable with large mbox inboxes (the prize goes to the user with a 500MB inbox). Eventually, I plan to move to maildir format, but for now I'm here. Also, we have legacy requirement for procmail, so I can't currently use deliver. Questions: 1) Any tuning I can do to improve this? 2) Any metrics, troubleshooting I should be doing to better characterize the problem? -- ==== Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 sdean(a)bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035

3 2

[Dovecot] avoiding getting maildir cur/ folder contents?
by Johannes Berg 19 Jul '07

19 Jul '07

Hi, On my server with many mails in one folder and slow IO, getting the mail listing in the cur/ folder is becoming a serious bottleneck. Dovecot is the only thing accessing the mail folders, so would there be any way to avoid getting a listing all the time? johannes

3 8

[Dovecot] Small problem with src/lib/mountpoint.c [now with patch attached!]
by Mike Brudenell 19 Jul '07

19 Jul '07

Greetings - [SIGH: I hit the "Send" button instead of "Attach". Here's Take 2...] Whilst playing with getting quotas from NFS-mounted filestores I've just discovered a slight problem with src/lib/mountpoint.c I had things working on a Solaris 10 test machine which had the mailstore mounted 'normally' using an entry in /etc/vfstab. However when I changed to use the automounter for the mailstore obtaining the quota broke. The problem lies with mountpoint_get(). On a 'normally' mounted filestore this obtains the device_path of the remote filestore in the form remoteservername.some.domain:/remote/path However when the mailstore was automounted I was instead getting back auto_direct which is the name of the automounter map we're using. The /etc/mnttab file has TWO entries for the auto-mounted filestore, like this: auto_direct /mailstore/messages/p autofs direct,ignore,dev=4740014 1184648400 crypt2.york.ac.uk:/vol/vol9/p /mailstore/messages/p nfs proto=tcp,xattr,dev=4700386 1184668792 Although there are two entries they have different device numbers. The mountpoint_get() function attempts to guard against this by checking the device number obtained matches that of the path being located. However for some reason I don't understand when getmntent() returns the FIRST of the above two entries it supplies the device number of the SECOND. Thus the device numbers match in the mountpoint_get() test and it thinks it has found the correct entry. This leads to the device_path being set to the map name -- auto_direct -- instead of the host:/path My fix is to add an additional fstype for the test to ignore: "autofs". The loop skips over any such mounts (along with the existing tests for "swap" and "ignore"). I'm attaching my minimal patch in case it's of help to anyone else. (Timo: would it be possible to get this added into the distribution code if you agree it's right?) Cheers, Mike Brudenell -- The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York Yo10 5DD, UK Tel:+44-1904-433811 FAX:+44-1904-433740 * Unsolicited commercial e-mail is NOT welcome at this e-mail address. *

2 5

[Dovecot] Shared folders and LDAP?
by Gavin Henry 19 Jul '07

19 Jul '07

Dear All, Is it possible to store shared folder lists in an LDAP Directory along with your virtual users? Will check the wiki too. Thanks, Gavin. -- Kind Regards, Gavin Henry. Managing Director. T +44 (0) 1224 279484 M +44 (0) 7930 323266 F +44 (0) 1224 824887 E ghenry(a)suretecsystems.com Open Source. Open Solutions(tm). http://www.suretecsystems.com/

2 4