November 2008 - dovecot

[Dovecot] batch convert mbox to maildir
by Netlink Tech 18 May '26

18 May '26

Hello, I have used mb2md for an individual user like this: su ~username cd ~ ./mb2md -m This converted /var/spool/mail/username mbox to /home/users/username/Maildir just as I expected. To convert 100s of users the same way would be a chore (su as each user for permissions, etc.). Is there a way to batch process all /var/spool/mail/$USER to /home/users/$USER/Maildir with the correct permissions/file owners for each user?

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[Dovecot] [PATCH, RFC] add APOP authentication mechanism
by Andrey Panin 14 Aug '17

14 Aug '17

Hello all, this patch add APOP authentication mechanism to dovecot 1.0-test23. Please take a look. Best regards. -- Andrey Panin | Linux and UNIX system administrator pazke(a)donpac.ru | PGP key: wwwkeys.pgp.net

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[Dovecot] Connecting to dovecot
by Grant Lowe 06 Jul '09

06 Jul '09

Hi All, I've got a brand new dovecot installation. I'm new to dovecot, so please be gentle :-) Anyway, I'm getting some errors when I try to connect to dovecot. I've tried searching the web and haven't been able to find a lot of information. Here's the config info: # dovecot --version 1.1.2 # dovecot -n sudo dovecot -n # 1.1.2: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf base_dir: /var/run/dovecot/ log_path: /var/log/dovecot.log ssl_disable: yes disable_plaintext_auth: no login_dir: /var/run/dovecot//login login_executable: /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login mail_location: /var/mail/%u auth default: verbose: yes passdb: driver: passwd-file args: /etc/dovecot/passwd userdb: driver: static args: uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/var/mail/%u # Here are the errors I'm getting. dovecot: Sep 16 18:44:15 Info: imap-login: Login: user=<wfoatst>, method=PLAIN, rip=172.20.58.4, lip=172.20.8.215 dovecot: Sep 16 18:44:15 Error: IMAP(wfoatst): mail_location not set and autodetection failed: Mail storage autodetection failed with ho me=/var/mail/wfoatst Thanks!

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[Dovecot] Spliting Folders for Efficiency
by Daniel Watts 28 Jun '09

28 Jun '09

Dear Timo, Would there be any sense in giving Dovecot the option to split folders into multiple subfolders when they reached a specified size (probably message count) limit? Dovecot would monitor folders and when they reached, say, 10,000 messages, silently split the folder on the filesystem to ensure that access remains fast. I know that Dovecot scales very well but this would give practically unlimited storage capability and also keep things fast. You could even have it so that the latest 100 messages are kept in their own folder for fast access. .Folder.new .Folder.cur .Folder.tmp could become: .Folder__1.new .Folder__1.cur .Folder__1.tmp and .Folder__2.new .Folder__2.cur .Folder__2.tmp with Dovecot merging them before display as just "Folder" within the mail client. This could be further extended so that Dovecot could be configured to store 'old' message folders in a separate location. We could then have slower+cheaper+larger storage mounted so that 'old mail' does not take up the expensive local SCSI disks on the machine. Mail from 2 years ago is much less likely to be accessed than mail from the last week. This would provide very neat behind-the-scenes archiving functionality. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Best, Daniel -- Squirrelmail Stable 1.4.8 (and developing on 1.5.2) PHP 5.x Hardened with Eaccelerator Apache 2.x Mysql 5.0.x Imapproxy over Dovecot 1.0.rc27 with Maildir all running on Gentoo Linux for ~5,000 users.

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[Dovecot] compressed mbox patch
by Axel Thimm 16 Jun '09

16 Jun '09

Some ages ago there existed a compressed mbox patch, but now all I can find are posting about it. Does such a beast exist and would it remotely apply to today's dovecot? If not, is there any hope that something like that emerges? Thanks! -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net

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[Dovecot] Authentication cache, failure to login after changed password
by Tom Sommer 16 Jun '09

16 Jun '09

Hi, I have an issue with the authentication cache. When a user changes his password, the cache doesn't seem to get flushed. Meaning the user is unable to log in to his IMAP account after changing his password. Flow: - Log into IMAP account using pass1 - Approved - Stored in auth cache - Change password to pass2 in MySQL - Log into IMAP account using pass2 - Access is denied - Restart dovecot - Log into IMAP account using pass2 - Approved I'd really like to continue to use the auth cache, is there any solution to the above? perhaps a way to debug the cache and auth process? I wasn't able to activate auth_debug without restarting Dovecot and solving the problem. Using version 1.1.1, MySQL userdb, with "nopassword=Y". Maybe it's due to nopassword? Thanks -- Tom

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[Dovecot] Feature Missing OUTBOX Folder
by Frank Doege 01 Jun '09

01 Jun '09

Hi Dovecot People, i have switched my system from courier-imap to dovecot and iam quite happy with it, the performance is well and i had nearly no problems. One little feature iam missing is in Courier i had a folder called "Outbox" there i could paste mails which i want to sent out. In some networks its not always available to sent mails via port 21, i know i could just set up my email server to another port but it was a nice feature. Is this a big afford or is it just alittle hack ? could it done via a little plugin ? Thanks Timo & all others for the great work ! Frank

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[Dovecot] IMAP ACLs and global ACLs in v1.2
by Timo Sirainen 23 Feb '09

23 Feb '09

I just committed code for IMAP ACL support based on the code from Kolab people. I did quite large changes though. I also changed how global ACLs are handled. Previously local ACLs could override global ACLs, but now that users are able to modify the ACLs I think it should be the other way around. From what I've heard global ACLs are typically added for things like 1) disallowing user from doing something in specific mailboxes such as expunge messages, 2) giving a specific master user access to some mailboxes ONLY, such as voicemail. For 1) case a user really shouldn't be able to grant himself privileges back but still should be able to share the mailbox to others (so the global ACL should have 'a' privilege). For 2) case a user shouldn't be able to remove privileges from the voicemail. So now the user can freely update the local ACLs in whatever way he wants. But in the end if there are any global ACLs, all the local ACLs for those identifiers are ignored. Also local negative identifiers are ignored, so that e.g. global "user=foo lr" can't be disabled by a local "-user=foo lr" ACL. I guess I should update the Wiki ACL page about how exactly the ACLs are applied now that they're well in my memory. :) One thing I'm not really sure about is the "owner" handling. IMAP ACL specifications have no such concept. I think many/most other servers simply add a default ACL for the user name directly. It's a useful concept though, especially with the global ACLs. So currently Dovecot replies: x getacl inbox * ACL "inbox" "owner" lrwstiekxacd x OK Getacl completed. But should it just internally convert "owner" to "username" when replying? But then again if there's a separate rule directly for the "username" it breaks. Do any of the existing ACL-capable IMAP clients want to see the username in the ACL reply or can they handle "owner" just fine? Also what about global ACLs? The current code just lists them twice with local ACLs, which is definitely wrong: x getacl foo * ACL "foo" "xx" w "xx" lr "owner" lrwstiekxacd x OK Getacl completed. Perhaps the global ACLs could have a prefix character? Maybe '#'? Which reminds me, the current dovecot-acl file is mapped to IMAP ACLs like this: dovecot-acl : IMAP ACL - anyone : anyone - authenticated : authenticated - owner : owner - user=name : name - group=name : $name - group-override=name : !$name So all global ACLs would get the # prefix, like #anyone, #name, #!$name. Any thoughts? BTW. Listing shared mailboxes still doesn't work. I guess we'll see tomorrow if I still have energy to get that done.

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[Dovecot] Dovecot performance on GFS clustered filesystem
by Allen Belletti 06 Feb '09

06 Feb '09

Hello All, We are using Dovecot 1.1.3 to serve IMAP on a pair of clustered Postfix servers which share a fiber array via the GFS clustered filesystem. This all works very well for the most part, with the exception that certain operations are so inefficient on GFS that they generate significant I/O load and hurt performance. We are using the Maildir format on disk. We're also using Dovecot's deliver from Postfix to handle local delivery. As best I can determine, the worst problems occur when certain users with very large Inboxes (~10k messages) receive new mail and their client looks up information about that message. GFS doesn't seem to efficiently handle the large directories that contain folders like this. As a result, lots of I/O ops are generated and performance suffers for everyone. I am beginning to wonder if it might be more efficient to revert to the old mbox format, with one file per folder (plus whatever indices are creates.) It seems that this ought to work better with GFS which is geared toward smaller numbers of larger files. Is anyone on the list currently doing that? Alternately, any thoughts regarding tuning or other options would be appreciated. Thanks, Allen -- Allen Belletti allen(a)isye.gatech.edu 404-894-6221 Phone Industrial and Systems Engineering 404-385-2988 Fax Georgia Institute of Technology

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[Dovecot] Courier->dovecot migration script
by Warren Baker 22 Jan '09

22 Jan '09

HI All, We have the latest Dovecot 1.1.6 running and I need to migrate some POP3 users over from Courier to Dovecot and would need to convert the courierpop3dsizelist to maintain the UIDs. I just need to confirm that the script (http://www.dovecot.org/tools/courier-dovecot-migrate.pl) only works for Dovecot v1.0 and not for v1.1? As the dovecout-uidlist file that is created (by the script) is not in the same format as dovecot-uidlist file that is created by the 1.1.6 server. Thanks, Warren

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