August 2007 - dovecot

[Dovecot] IMAPs and POP3s poxying
by Jason Russler 01 Aug '07

01 Aug '07

Hi All, I have a polotical situation at work that requires that I off-load mail access to a host other than the one our users have configured in their clients. I don't have access to any of the switching or routing to our hosts, and there's only a 1 to 1 relationship between the proxy I want to set up and the actual mail handler. I was looking at the proxying Howto in the Wiki and was presented with an SQL server requirement to do user/ip address look-ups. In my case, it will always be proxying the same host. How would I configure Dovecot to proxy another single system without doing the SQL look-up? Is there a port-forwarding solution that would work better (for POP3s and IMAPS)? These are RedHat 5 hosts so Netfilter is fair game if the protocols allow. Thanks, -Jason

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[Dovecot] apparent bug with filesystem quota and message lists
by Stewart Dean 01 Aug '07

01 Aug '07

Don't know if anyone else uses Berkeley derived filesystem quota, but IBM's AIX does. A little over a week after migrating from UWIMAP to DC (with mbox format unchanged) everything is clean except for this one problem: When users go over quota, when they login the next time, the folder list is blank. You can imagine the panicked calls to the Helpdesk. If their quotas are raised or re-graced, Get Mail returns the expected list. This behavior happens with a variety of clients: Pine, MacMail,TBird, Horde Webmail, etc. The index filesystem has no quota on it. I would have to imagine the Dovecot is using (or trying to use) some space in the quota'ed filesystems which the operating system won't allow, and this results in there being an empty file that DC uses for the message list sent to the client. There are NO messages in syslog (other than the expected login and logout) indicating any problems. Our legacy setup has the inboxes in /var/spool/mail, and the folders in ~/mail. The problem can happen either place. dovecot -n returns: > # 1.0.1: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf > listen: *:143 > ssl_listen: *:993 > disable_plaintext_auth: no > login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login > login_executable: /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login > login_processes_count: 12 > login_max_processes_count: 774 > verbose_proctitle: yes > first_valid_uid: 200 > mail_location: mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/dcindx/%u > mbox_dirty_syncs: no > mbox_lazy_writes: no > auth default: > passdb: > driver: pam > userdb: > driver: passwd Suggestions? -- ==== 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

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[Dovecot] Dovecot won't build against recent version of GnuTLS
by Jasper Bryant-Greene 01 Aug '07

01 Aug '07

Hi all, Dovecot won't build against recent versions of GnuTLS. The problem starts on line 34 of src/master/ssl-init-gnutls.c, where Dovecot generates DH params using gnutls_dh_params_generate(), a function which no longer exists [replaced with gnutls_dh_params_generate2()]. I'd fix it myself, but the signature of the function has changed to take gnutls_dh_params_t rather than prime & generator, and I'm not keen on hacking SSL code unless I really understand what's going on. It looks like the code goes on to save & free those values. I'm tracking HG and am happy to test any changes. Appreciate it if someone with more knowledge of GnuTLS and perhaps this code in particular could take a look. Thanks, J

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[Dovecot] pop3 connections hanging
by Arjun Datta 01 Aug '07

01 Aug '07

Hi, dovecot --version 1.0.beta8 dovecot -n login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login login_executable(default): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(imap): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(pop3): /usr/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login mail_executable(default): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(imap): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(pop3): /usr/libexec/dovecot/pop3 mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3 auth default: passdb: driver: pam userdb: driver: passwd It is running with sendmail-8.13.5-3 on FC5 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 I find that occasionally a pop3 connection will just sit there for hours on end. It will not release the lock on the user mailbox and so mail to that user cannot be delivered. As a result the mailq backs up mostly with mail to that user. Closing the MUA does not help. I have to kill -9 PID the process to clear the hung connection. This happens with both Outlook and Thunderbird. Is there an option in the dovecot configuration that I can set to automatically close connections after say 30 minutes ? In the workaround section it says that it will close connections from Outlook & Outlook Express after 30 minutes dues to an IDLE bug in those 2. Regards, Arjun Datta

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