March 2008 - dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] IMAP - multi-simultaneous-user mail store
by Tim Alberts 19 Mar '08

19 Mar '08

I'm finishing converting from POP to IMAP and I'm seeing some potentially powerful uses, but I wonder if my ideas aren't more abuses. I want to create 'multi-user' accounts that allow groups of users to archive and share emails with each other. For example, in the case of a sales department, emails from customers may have requests for new product features. I could create an IMAP storage for sales that allows the sales staff to copy these requests into a common email account. These could then be sorted and searched by the product development team to better determine what customers want where product development should go. Another example, a service/support group has some problem customers that frequently call multiple technicians for support. The service group can save all correspondence with this customer in a single location so they can better work together to provide support for this customer. The possibilities for sharing emails in groups seem endless to me, but it depends on if it's a 'use' or 'abuse' of the IMAP protocol, and if Dovecot in-particular is designed to be able to handle this. Thoughts?

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[Dovecot] Converting from UW-IMAP to dovecot - odd client problems
by Michael Durket 19 Mar '08

19 Mar '08

Our installation currently uses an old version of UW-IMAP. Instead of upgrading to the latest version, we're in the process of testing dovecot 1.0.13 on a Solaris 9 machine (using a different set of network ports of course so both the old and new systems can coexist during testing). We've been asking selected users to switch from UW-IMAP to dovecot in order to test various clients and OSes with dovecot. On our system the inboxes are always on local disk, but the indexes and any folders may be on NFS or local disk (it has to do with how and where we added disk as our user population increased over time). Only a single server is ever used and I've made sure for our version of dovecot that the settings specified for NFS are as described in the Wiki article. We've noticed some oddities which we can't figure out: 1) When siwtching a Thunderbird user running on a Fedora system (latest version of Thunderbird) Thunderbird couldn't see his mail folders even when the appropriate checkbox (Server Settings -> Advanced -> Show Only Subscribed Folders) was unchecked. Clearing out the IMAP Server Directory setting seemed to fix this, but the very next day, the folders were gone again and we've been unable since to get Thunderbird to see them. Using the same version of Thunderbird, running on Mac OS X 10.5.2 yields no such problem. Another problem with this same user involved a test wherein we created a new mail folder and then deleted it. The deletion caused an error message to be displayed (inferior folders, etc) but on the Mac OS X version no such error occurred and the folder was deleted. Investigating the protocol traces for Thunderbird showed that in the error case, it attempted to rename the deleted folder as a subfolder of the Trash folder (thus generating the error message) but on the Mac OS X version, it actually deleted the folder (which would seem to make more sense). The settings pertaining to the Trash folder are the same on both clients. 2) When switching an Apple Mail.app user running on Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger) at the latest patch level, things appeared to work fine, and then the user mentioned that no mail was showing up in her inbox. Closing and restarting Mail.app appeared to fix that temporarily. She normally keeps a large number of messages in her inbox (approximately 7000+) and receives a large number of messages each day (several hundred). In this case, the Postfix mail logs showed that mail was being received, and the procmail delivery log for this user showed that procmail was putting the mail in her inbox, yet Mail.app was not indicating the presence of new mail (until it was restarted). Also Mail.app became very very slow at startup and shutdown (taking several minutes as compared to a few seconds normally). We've had no problems so far with another Tiger Mail.app user (but his inbox is considerably smaller) and no problems yet with converting a Eudora user running under Windows, but this is a stumbling block in our efforts to convert to dovecot since we'd hoped to be able to switch users over fairly easily (just by changing the port address mostly). While these woud seem to be client problems at first glance, the common factor of course is dovecot. There are no problems with any of these clients using UW-IMAP. I'm hoping that perhaps there are some readers of this list that might have seen similar problems and know of solutions, or could point me to some ways of debugging these problems (with Thunderbird I can at least debug IMAP protocol exchanges, but since dovecot doesn't log IMAP exchanges for specific IPs and since the socket connections are all via STARTTLS I can't use tcpdump so I'm kind of at a loss for how to track these things down short of patching the dovecot code to put in tracing messages). Any suggestions would be appreciated (and would help us complete our conversion to dovecot). Michael Durket

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[Dovecot] Dovecot / FreeBSD / Nfs mailstore / Index=memory
by Xavier Beaudouin 19 Mar '08

19 Mar '08

Hello, I have recently changed imap from Courier-imap to dovecot because of serial problems with courier-imap, I have being forced to do it very quickly... and without extensives tests. I have 3 mails servers (freebsd based) behind a load balancer and a nfs mailstore on a netapp. On my first tests I have setup the index into some nfs shared mount, but it seems that some imap clients are going mad when deleting files (mostly because they do open some new imap connection and the index was not clean) so I have changed index to memory. This has fixed one of my problems. Now I have some strange problems is that NFS activity passed from about... 5mbps to more than 70Mpbs... Is there any reasons about that ? OS: FreeBSD 6.2-p11 / x86 Dovecot : 1.0.13 (freebsd ports) Auth: ldap based Nfs mail spool : filer:/vol/vol0/mail /var/mailusers nfs rw,nfsv3,mntudp,bg,noatime,nolockd 0 0 Thanks, /Xavier

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Re: [Dovecot] Remote resources in kde-pim
by Steffen Kaiser 19 Mar '08

19 Mar '08

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Anne Wilson wrote: > Thanks for replying. I have had IMAP mail for some time, but to get the > resources working I need, apparently, to be able to log in as Groupware to > access the shared resources. > > On the server I added sections to dovecot.conf and postfix main.cf as > described in HowTo/PostfixAndDovecotSASL. In KMail, on the client, I > used 'See what the server supports' and set it to TLS + clear text. I don't > appear to be getting a rejection, but the resources are not being read. > > /var/log/maillog shows these lines > > Mar 17 13:35:52 borg2 postfix/smtp[24339]: fatal: specify a password table via > the `smtp_sasl_password_maps' configuration parameter Hmm, I'd say that postfix has nothing to do with it. If you want to have postfix authentificate from the same Database as Dovecot, you need it, but otherwise I do not see no relation. Or do you installed some script, that checks mails for Groupware-related ones and act upon them immediately? I cannot help you with Postfix. For shared resources you'll need yet another, shared account or look into the ACL plugin. KOrganizer even supports imap URLs natively, I saw right now. Bye, - -- Steffen Kaiser -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFH4PWgVJMDrex4hCIRAr55AJ90NhgkLLUczDfFGttP6dxpZbhcrwCfRaSS 153FyDkSf+vLwY08MXjbLJ0= =q5sU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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[Dovecot] Missing folders after converting from Courier imap to dovecot
by M. Bobkiewicz 19 Mar '08

19 Mar '08

Hi, I?ve searched around for my problem but couldn?t find a solution. My setup: Centos 5.1 with postfix 2.5.1 (from source) and dovecot 1.0.10 (from source). I?m coming from an old Trustix 2.2 box with postfix 2.2.x and Courier imap with Maildir format mailboxes. For testing I?ve copied over some of the mailboxes from the old machine. After logging in to the new machine with Thunderbird only the incoming and trash folders appear in the Thunderbird sidebar all the rest are not showing up. When you send an email the sent folder appears with all mails this account has sent from the old machine, same with drafts etc. Access a folder directly and it will appear with all it?s content. This is some kind of nasty if you have to do this for several hundred folders. I?ve tried to fix the problem by changing the namespace private parameter "prefix" to ".". Also tried to rename courierimapuiddb to dovecot-uidlist. Both tricks don?t work. Unfortunately I can?t find the mentioned courier-dovecot-migrate.pl, maybe this would help... Any help and suggestion would be welcome. Best regards, Mike

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[Dovecot] problems with postfix->procmail->deliver
by Andy Greenwood 19 Mar '08

19 Mar '08

Hi all. I'm relatively new to Dovecot, but I really like what I'm seeing so far. I have one problem that I was hoping you could help me with though. I use Postfix for my mail server, then pass that on to procmail for filtering, and finally to deliver to put the mail in the appropriate Maildir folder. However, this isn't working. Postfix passes the mail to procmail correctly, but procmail is failing when it tries to call deliver. My system-wide procmailrc matches the lower one shown here: http://wiki.dovecot.org/procmail?highlight=%28procmail%29 which uses deliver. My personal ~/.procmailrc is of similar format :0 * ^List-id:.<beginners.perl.org> #.perl/ | $DELIVER -m perl :0 * ^Sender:.owner.freebsd-\/[^@]+@FreeBSD.ORG { LISTNAME=${MATCH} :0 * LISTNAME??^\/[^@]+ # .freebsd-${MATCH}/ | $DELIVER -m freebsd-${MATCH} } :0 * ^Sender:.owner-cvs-all@freebsd.org #.cvs-all/ | $DELIVER -m cvs-all :0 * ^Delivered-To: greenwood.andy+combackup(a)gmail.com #.work/ | $DELIVER -m work :0 #$HOME/Maildir/ | $DELIVER However, my procmail logs show this error message for every message that comes through: Fatal: destination user parameter (-d user) not given I can see that the variable $DELIVER doesn't use the -d parameter, but I'm not sure on how I would specify the value in a multi-user system. I know I could just use deliver directly from Postfix, but I really want to use the filtering capabilities of procmail. If you need any additional information, just let me know. Thanks in advance for any help you can give, and big thanks for this great piece of software! Andy Greenwood

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[Dovecot] max connects per host?
by subscriber＠viliar.net.ru 19 Mar '08

19 Mar '08

Message: 3 Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:48:34 +0100 From: Johan Fredin <johan(a)spelaroll.se> Subject: Re: [Dovecot] max connects per host? To: dovecot(a)dovecot.org Message-ID: <47E0D362.9070206(a)spelaroll.se> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1251; format=flowed I would personally use the operating systems firewall software for this. Seems redundant that every piece of software accepting connections should duplicate the functionality of a firewall. /Johan Yes. In some cases it could be good choice. But in _general_ it's not. It's about functionality of a mail server, isn't so? And how your users will know, what they reached limits and it's not case of broken connection/firewall/network related problems and so on?

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[Dovecot] deliver to namespace using "deliver"
by Nikolay Shopik 19 Mar '08

19 Mar '08

Hi list, I would like to test new functionality in latest 1.1 release, but can't find information on wiki. How can I deliver messages to different namespaces using "deliver"?

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[Dovecot] max connects per host?
by subscriber＠viliar.net.ru 19 Mar '08

19 Mar '08

Hi everyone! I want to manage mail server resource part (like it can CGP) and with it I have one question. Is any way to limit overall max simultaneous connections to imap/pop3 server from one(each) host, except use iptables/ipfw and so on? Like a patch to dovecot or, maybe, it can be released in future versions? I know about mail_max_userip_connections in dovecot 1.1 but it can't limit hosts this way. Thank you.

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[Dovecot] Invalid quota rule using "backend"
by Laurento Frittella 19 Mar '08

19 Mar '08

Using a quota rule like "quota_rule = *:backend=1073741824S" (I'm testing it statically but the value is on LDAP) I receive an an error: Fatal: IMAP(...): Quota root QUOTA: Invalid rule: *:backend=1073741824S Accordingly with the wiki page http://wiki.dovecot.org/Quota/New "Backend-specific configuration currently is used only with Maildir++ quota backend. It means you can have the quota in Maildir++ format (e.g. "10000000S")." so I think it should work. What's wrong? Cheers, Laurento

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