March 2015 - dovecot - dovecot.org

Sieve extprograms socket vs. direct execution
by E.B. 11 Mar '15

11 Mar '15

Hi, I'm hoping to get some clarification of the differences between calling a script using the Sieve extprograms plugin execute method via direct execution or using the socket feature. Being naive, I see the socket option and think that way you tell Dovecot to spawn a daemon and I think that's going to be far superior in performance. But if that really was the difference, why would direct execution even be an option? (And doesn't the daemon still have to spawn a new shell every time if the target is a shell script? Does that defeat the purpose of having a daemon?) So I don't really know what the difference is, and under what circumstances you'd want to use one or the other. Can someone please help clarify?

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Extending dict lookups (SQL)?
by E.B. 11 Mar '15

11 Mar '15

Hi, How difficult would it be to try to hack some extension to the Dovecot dict mechanism for someone unfamiliar with the code? I'm using SQL as a backend and am looking for, at a minimum, the ability to specify a WHERE clause in addition to the built-in one that feeds the current username. The field name to test the additional value against would be necessary as well of course. Naturally, full query customization would be great to have. Perhaps providing a mechanism for the caller to pass data for the extra WHERE clause is the hardest part, not sure... but it can't hurt to ask. Don't take this as lack of gratitude - I can work with what's there and greatly appreciate it.

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Re: Outlook 2013/2010 nightmare #2
by Joseph Tam 11 Mar '15

11 Mar '15

"David.M.Clark" <david(a)davrom.com> writes: > So the bottom line for this particular site is: > > Set the "Root Folder" for IMAP in outlook to "mail". This is messy from > my beloved Linux command line perspective in that you end up with > ${HOME}/login_name/mail/mail. But it does work and stops the Outlook > crashes. If "root folder" is Outlook's parlance for IMAP prefix, you might find it helpful to configure a namespace alias. For examples, see http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Namespaces (Section Backwards Compatibility: UW-IMAP) It will map different npamespaces to the same folder so you don't have this mail/mail/ goofiness. > If you want to share a single e-mail account across multiple PCs running > Outlook 2013, you _cannot_ use the "Root Folder" of "mail" as I have > indicated above. The workaround is to create each subsequent PC with a > "mail2", "mail3" etc folder (without the quote marks of course). If you > set up two PCs with the same Root Folder, the new PC crashes out of > Outlook and eventually so does the original PC. The only way around this > is to delete the identity and PST files in Outlook and strictly set them > up again to different "mail" something folders. Almost reminds me of the > old MS "Share Violation" issue :-) > > So after the user is set to the mail2/mail3 folder and it appears under > the user's original "mail" folder, you then have to blow away the > mail2/mail3 folder and then do a symbolic link to the mail folder: > > ln -s mail mail2 Again, namespace aliases might help: you can configure as many as you like. It's a kludge though -- the behaviour you report is really bizarre. Joseph Tam <jtam.home(a)gmail.com>

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Migrating from NetApp to ZFS
by Frido Otten 10 Mar '15

10 Mar '15

Hi All, We're currently in the process of migrating from a NetApp storage to a ZFS storage, both shared over NFS. We've ran into some problems which were solved by switching to dotlocks instead of flock. But now there's one problem left with the dotlock method. When connecting to Dovecot/IMAP, and moving messages from one folder to another, it is very slow and I'm suspecting this has all to do with the dotlock method. During this process of moving mail, the dotlock file is created and stays there for about 90 seconds. The mail client is unresponsive in this time period. This happens also when a new message is delivered to the mailbox. The dovecot example config talks about that dotlocking is using some tricks which may create more disk I/O than other locking methods. What are these tricks and can it be the cause of the slowness? We've tested it on different ZFS storages and the problem seems to only exist on ZFS storages which have their ZIL on SSD's Just creating and removing a file from the CLI is fast though. Regards, Frido

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Re: Outlook 2013/2010 nightmare #2
by David.M.Clark 10 Mar '15

10 Mar '15

Yes Eric, Outlook also has a declaration that as of either version 2010 or 2013, they no longer download IMAP headers, they download the whole message - thank God for faster Internet connections these days - could you imagine that in the older dialup days? Still it is a waste of bandwidth and disk space to do this. I am so tired of how they claim to use the RFC and indicate they are 'compatible' with a certain protocol/procedure, but really just move the goal posts so you can only talk to M$ stuff at the back end using their enforcements. All part of locking people into the "perpetual upgrade" path I guess. On 03/10/2015 10:22 AM, Eric Broch wrote: > Not only does M$ Outlook not work well with others, it strips headers I > use for training spam filters. > > On 3/9/2015 5:48 PM, David.M.Clark wrote: >> Hi All and my sincere thanks to Jakob and Joseph for your responses. >> >> I got around the nightmare for this site but it is far from >> satisfactory and given both Thunderbird, Roundcube and the Android >> e-mail client work perfectly as expected, this following links >> comments enforce what I experienced over the weekend: >> >> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.dovecot/79231 >> >> I have not struck this for other sites using Outlook 2013 (though I >> continually banter that Outlook version 'anything' is designed for MS >> Exchange and nothing else), but then again I have not had Outlook >> needing to share the same e-mail accounts across PCs. >> >> So the bottom line for this particular site is: >> >> Set the "Root Folder" for IMAP in outlook to "mail". This is messy >> from my beloved Linux command line perspective in that you end up with >> ${HOME}/login_name/mail/mail. But it does work and stops the Outlook >> crashes. >> >> If you set it to the Outlook recommended "INBOX" or "Inbox", you can't >> see or access subfolders. >> >> Now here comes the ugly part of Outlook 2013 using IMAP to Linux (at >> least for this site): >> >> If you want to share a single e-mail account across multiple PCs >> running Outlook 2013, you _cannot_ use the "Root Folder" of "mail" as >> I have indicated above. The workaround is to create each subsequent PC >> with a "mail2", "mail3" etc folder (without the quote marks of >> course). If you set up two PCs with the same Root Folder, the new PC >> crashes out of Outlook and eventually so does the original PC. The >> only way around this is to delete the identity and PST files in >> Outlook and strictly set them up again to different "mail" something >> folders. Almost reminds me of the old MS "Share Violation" issue :-) >> >> So after the user is set to the mail2/mail3 folder and it appears >> under the user's original "mail" folder, you then have to blow away >> the mail2/mail3 folder and then do a symbolic link to the mail folder: >> >> ln -s mail mail2 >> >> In this way, both users on the PCs will be seeing the same IMAP >> folders, being mail and mail2 on two different PCs. Naturally to add a >> third PC to this would be "mail3" etc. >> >> Now the other ugly part of this is you also need to update their >> .subscriptions file in ${HOME}/login_name/mail to show folders like: >> >> mail/Sent Items >> mail/Junk E-mails >> mail2/Sent Items >> mail2/Junk E-mails >> >> Given you would need to manually do this above, and is just not >> suitable, I have written two scripts to automate this process and it >> works cleanly so far. >> >> The first script does the automatic removal of the mail2/mail3 etc >> directory and creates the symbolic link, the second script is used to >> redo the .subscriptions file if the contents of the 'mail' directory >> change. >> >> You may need to mod these but I have a cron running as root to do this. >> >> Script 1 (mail_root_enforce): >> >> =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------= >> >> COMPLETE_HOME=/u/home >> cd ${COMPLETE_HOME} >> >> for USERHOME in * >> do >> ls -d ${USERHOME}/mail/mail? | while read CHECKME >> do >> JUST_CHECKME=`basename ${CHECKME}` >> if [ -d ${CHECKME} -a -L ${CHECKME} ] >> then >> #echo "${CHECKME} is ok" >> : >> else >> echo "${CHECKME} is _not_ ok" >> cd ${USERHOME}/mail >> rm -rf ${COMPLETE_HOME}/${CHECKME} >> ln -s mail ${JUST_CHECKME} >> fi >> done >> cd ${COMPLETE_HOME} >> done >> =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------= >> >> >> Script 2 (mail_multi_users): >> >> =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------= >> >> cd /u/home >> >> for THIS_USER in * >> do >> MORE_THAN_1=`ls -d ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail* | wc -l` >> if [ "${MORE_THAN_1}" -gt "1" ] >> then >> # echo "${THIS_USER} has more than one" >> ls ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail >${THIS_USER}/subcount >> if [ ! -f ${THIS_USER}/subcount_last ] >> then >> >${THIS_USER}/subcount_last >> fi >> ISDIFF=`diff ${THIS_USER}/subcount ${THIS_USER}/subcount_last | >> wc -l | awk '{print $1}'` >> if [ "${ISDIFF}" -gt "0" ] >> then >> # echo "Is Different" >> ls ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail >${THIS_USER}/subscription_tmp >> >${THIS_USER}/subscription_new >> for ROOT_MAIL_DIR in ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail* >> do >> MAIL_BASE_NAME=`basename ${ROOT_MAIL_DIR}` >> cat ${THIS_USER}/subscription_tmp | sed >> "s:^:$MAIL_BASE_NAME/:g" >>${THIS_USER}/subscription_new >> done >> cp ${THIS_USER}/subscription_new >> ${THIS_USER}/mail/.subscriptions >> chown ${THIS_USER}:popusers ${THIS_USER}/mail/.subscriptions >> cp ${THIS_USER}/subcount ${THIS_USER}/subcount_last >> fi >> fi >> done >> =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------= >> >> >> You will note the ${HOME} directories are all under /u/home so if you >> do sadly need to use these scripts, please change the /u/home to suite >> the ${HOME} location set on your server. I prefer to run this as root >> to enforce things and not have any funny permission errors, and also >> to save needing to run multiple instances for multiples users. >> >> One annoying caveat that the site will have to get used to: the mail2, >> mail3 folders do show up when using good e-mail clients like >> Thunderbird, SOGo, Roundcube or Android e-mail client. This is because >> they are seeing the contents of the .subscriptions file. I haven't >> looked into Dovecot doco for possible multiple .subscription files to >> make the folders bit look 'nicer'. I will look at something like >> 'namespace' to see if this might help. Please bear in mind this was in >> an emergency to get things at least 'working' so the users were happy >> when they hit the office on Monday. >> >> A documented story for your perusal and use if you are 'stuck' like I >> was. I will continue to try and see if there is a more elegant >> work-around but for now, this is all I can come up with. >> >> PS: I notice everyone suppresses their e-mail footer so doing the same >> here :-) >> -- As always, I remain at your service. Kindest Regards, David.M.Clark

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Re: Outlook 2013/2010 nightmare #3
by David.M.Clark 10 Mar '15

10 Mar '15

Hi All, Sorry for the extra e-mail. Given I am helping roll out this identical setup again I am thinking I will test another approach which I am hoping will work but given having two or more PCs trying to access the 'mail' folder crashed at this site on the weekend, I went away from this. But in my thinking perhaps it 'might' work if same login ID is not used to access the exact same area. Example: 1. Setup user "accounts" and open the permissions of its folders. (${HOME} = /u/home/accounts) 2. Create "accounts2" but have its ${HOME} directory set to the same as "accounts". (${HOME} = /u/home/accounts) Make sure accounts2 can fully access everything - perhaps I will need to enforce a central GID (group ID) for each user to belong to (eg., accounts). 3. See if the same crash issue happens if using a different login name. This is using the reverse approach of not having separate Root Folder paths for the same Linux login ID. If this does work I can then reverse engineer the issue at the site over the weekend as well. Will keep you posted. -- As always, I remain at your service. Kindest Regards, David.M.Clark

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Re: Outlook 2013/2010 nightmare #2
by David.M.Clark 10 Mar '15

10 Mar '15

Hi All and my sincere thanks to Jakob and Joseph for your responses. I got around the nightmare for this site but it is far from satisfactory and given both Thunderbird, Roundcube and the Android e-mail client work perfectly as expected, this following links comments enforce what I experienced over the weekend: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.dovecot/79231 I have not struck this for other sites using Outlook 2013 (though I continually banter that Outlook version 'anything' is designed for MS Exchange and nothing else), but then again I have not had Outlook needing to share the same e-mail accounts across PCs. So the bottom line for this particular site is: Set the "Root Folder" for IMAP in outlook to "mail". This is messy from my beloved Linux command line perspective in that you end up with ${HOME}/login_name/mail/mail. But it does work and stops the Outlook crashes. If you set it to the Outlook recommended "INBOX" or "Inbox", you can't see or access subfolders. Now here comes the ugly part of Outlook 2013 using IMAP to Linux (at least for this site): If you want to share a single e-mail account across multiple PCs running Outlook 2013, you _cannot_ use the "Root Folder" of "mail" as I have indicated above. The workaround is to create each subsequent PC with a "mail2", "mail3" etc folder (without the quote marks of course). If you set up two PCs with the same Root Folder, the new PC crashes out of Outlook and eventually so does the original PC. The only way around this is to delete the identity and PST files in Outlook and strictly set them up again to different "mail" something folders. Almost reminds me of the old MS "Share Violation" issue :-) So after the user is set to the mail2/mail3 folder and it appears under the user's original "mail" folder, you then have to blow away the mail2/mail3 folder and then do a symbolic link to the mail folder: ln -s mail mail2 In this way, both users on the PCs will be seeing the same IMAP folders, being mail and mail2 on two different PCs. Naturally to add a third PC to this would be "mail3" etc. Now the other ugly part of this is you also need to update their .subscriptions file in ${HOME}/login_name/mail to show folders like: mail/Sent Items mail/Junk E-mails mail2/Sent Items mail2/Junk E-mails Given you would need to manually do this above, and is just not suitable, I have written two scripts to automate this process and it works cleanly so far. The first script does the automatic removal of the mail2/mail3 etc directory and creates the symbolic link, the second script is used to redo the .subscriptions file if the contents of the 'mail' directory change. You may need to mod these but I have a cron running as root to do this. Script 1 (mail_root_enforce): =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------= COMPLETE_HOME=/u/home cd ${COMPLETE_HOME} for USERHOME in * do ls -d ${USERHOME}/mail/mail? | while read CHECKME do JUST_CHECKME=`basename ${CHECKME}` if [ -d ${CHECKME} -a -L ${CHECKME} ] then #echo "${CHECKME} is ok" : else echo "${CHECKME} is _not_ ok" cd ${USERHOME}/mail rm -rf ${COMPLETE_HOME}/${CHECKME} ln -s mail ${JUST_CHECKME} fi done cd ${COMPLETE_HOME} done =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------= Script 2 (mail_multi_users): =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------= cd /u/home for THIS_USER in * do MORE_THAN_1=`ls -d ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail* | wc -l` if [ "${MORE_THAN_1}" -gt "1" ] then # echo "${THIS_USER} has more than one" ls ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail >${THIS_USER}/subcount if [ ! -f ${THIS_USER}/subcount_last ] then >${THIS_USER}/subcount_last fi ISDIFF=`diff ${THIS_USER}/subcount ${THIS_USER}/subcount_last | wc -l | awk '{print $1}'` if [ "${ISDIFF}" -gt "0" ] then # echo "Is Different" ls ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail >${THIS_USER}/subscription_tmp >${THIS_USER}/subscription_new for ROOT_MAIL_DIR in ${THIS_USER}/mail/mail* do MAIL_BASE_NAME=`basename ${ROOT_MAIL_DIR}` cat ${THIS_USER}/subscription_tmp | sed "s:^:$MAIL_BASE_NAME/:g" >>${THIS_USER}/subscription_new done cp ${THIS_USER}/subscription_new ${THIS_USER}/mail/.subscriptions chown ${THIS_USER}:popusers ${THIS_USER}/mail/.subscriptions cp ${THIS_USER}/subcount ${THIS_USER}/subcount_last fi fi done =----------------------------------------------------------------------------------= You will note the ${HOME} directories are all under /u/home so if you do sadly need to use these scripts, please change the /u/home to suite the ${HOME} location set on your server. I prefer to run this as root to enforce things and not have any funny permission errors, and also to save needing to run multiple instances for multiples users. One annoying caveat that the site will have to get used to: the mail2, mail3 folders do show up when using good e-mail clients like Thunderbird, SOGo, Roundcube or Android e-mail client. This is because they are seeing the contents of the .subscriptions file. I haven't looked into Dovecot doco for possible multiple .subscription files to make the folders bit look 'nicer'. I will look at something like 'namespace' to see if this might help. Please bear in mind this was in an emergency to get things at least 'working' so the users were happy when they hit the office on Monday. A documented story for your perusal and use if you are 'stuck' like I was. I will continue to try and see if there is a more elegant work-around but for now, this is all I can come up with. PS: I notice everyone suppresses their e-mail footer so doing the same here :-) -- As always, I remain at your service. Kindest Regards, David.M.Clark

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Outlook 2013/2010 nightmare
by David.M.Clark 09 Mar '15

09 Mar '15

Hi All, This is my first post so forgive me if this hits the wrong list. I have been using dovecot for years happily with SendMail on mainly CentOS servers, and my customers are starting to more and more use Thunderbird, so my perfect model is: Linux --> Dovecot --> SendMail --> Thunderbird (or mobile phone e-mail app). I do have some customers using Outlook or Windows Live Mail, and these are for the most part working fine with IMAP - I don't do POP. My mod to the dovecot.conf file: disable_plaintext_auth=no My mod to conf.d/10-mail.conf: #mail_location = mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u My mod to conf.d/10-master.conf: #default_internal_user = dovecot service imap-login { inet_listener imap { port = 143 } inet_listener imap_second { port = 10143 } inet_listener imaps { #port = 993 #ssl = yes } - I do the 10143 bit so I can pseudo hide port 143 for clients with devices that access both internally and externally - port forwarded on MikroTik routers for my customers. All goes well for many years with the above configs, and continues to be awesome as always. Under the user's ${HOME} directory they end up with a lovely 'mail' directory and all of the e-mail client folders live in harmony under there. This weekend I am helping a customer cut over his customer from legacy POP based e-mail uses with splatterings of Outlook 2010 and 2013 throughout the company, to using Linux with IMAP in the setup as described above as per my standard configs. The issue starts when you add an IMAP user to the Outlook client and upon opening it, initially, it tries to find a "Sent" Items folder under IMAP to send from. To this end I have traditionally gone into the dialogue box that opens, click on the IMAP account to receive a list of possible folders, but it now immediately crashes indicating Outlook has had an error, and it all goes to hell from there. Outlook then cannot open but keeps crashing with its "unknown error". Up to last week at another site with Windows Live Mail, this was not an issue. By modifying the e-mail account via Control Panel, I can delete or modify the account and try again. Here is what I found: If I don't specify a 'root' folder under the "Advanced" tab which also contains the port selections for 143 and 25, it fails. If I follow the MS recommended root folder example from Microsoft and use INBOX, or Inbox, it 'does' stop the error but you can't create subfolders - I am assuming as this is picking up the .imap/INBOX folder or something and makes sense that it can't create folders under INBOX/Inbox, particularly if this is a file rather than a directory that dovecot/Outlook are pointing to. What I have found is I can 'lie' to Outlook and put in a 'mail' folder. This results in a ${HOME}/login_name/mail/mail folder, but I don't care, as it happily puts files under mail/mail. Now here is something totally strange: If I try to put this same account on another PC so users can 'share' the same e-mail account, even with my 'mail' root folder work-around, it crashes again. All through this, Thuderbird works fine and so does RoundCube - SOGo will be up and working a bit later once I get the initial part up and going... but I digress but good to know it is only Outlook doing this. To share multiple accounts I am currently getting the subsequent PCs that need to share a universal account to select a root folder mail2, mail3 etc. I then delete these folders and symbolic link the mail2, mail3 etc to the mail directory - yucky fix, but kind of works with some auto scripting of .subscriptions to follow so all of the Outlook clients sync to the one 'real' root folder. I have never seen this before and have customers running all kinds of IMAP e-mail clients to dovecot on Linux. I saw an MS posted bug on something for IMAP and they recommend rolling back MS updates to fix it - but I am not sure the client can or will do that. This kind of random issue that only affects this site at present is why I only recommend people use e-mail clients like Thunderbird because it just 'works'. The users at this site would not switch and will cite they have been working in a POP situation on their other Linux box since Adam was a boy. Any help would be very much appreciated. I like to think I can do this with my eyes shut by now, but this one has got me stumped. -- As always, I remain at your service. Kindest Regards, David.M.Clark (Director - Senior Linux/UNIX Consultant) =----------------------------------------------------------------------= Davrom Consulting Pty Ltd E-mail : david(a)davrom.com PO Box 1644, Sunnybank Hills, 4109 Twitter: @DavidClark1961 ABN: 81 096 990 804 MSN: david(a)davrom.com Phone/Fax: 61-7-32720267 Skype: dmc1961 Mobile: 0418-763124 Google: dmc1961(a)gmail.com Podcast: http://www.davrom.com/ldup/ldup_rss.xml =---------------------- http://www.davrom.com -------------------------= Specialising in: Linux (Fedora/RedHat/CentOS), UNIX, SCO, MikroTik, Networking/Internet, E-mail/Web Technologies =----------------------------------------------------------------------= Please note: Any e-mail communication bearing this signature is for the exclusive purpose of the sender and is not for publication without the expressed permission of the sender or respective sender's organisation. =----------------------------------------------------------------------=

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Expunge messages older than
by absolutely_free＠libero.it 09 Mar '15

09 Mar '15

Hi, I am using Dovecot 2.2.13 on cPanel server. Is there a way to delete messages older than some date for a number of users (in every subfolder)? Thank you

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Re: Outlook 2013/2010 nightmare
by Joseph Tam 09 Mar '15

09 Mar '15

"David.M.Clark" <david(a)davrom.com> writes: > I do have some customers using Outlook or Windows Live Mail, and these > are for the most part working fine with IMAP - I don't do POP. > ... > The issue starts when you add an IMAP user to the Outlook client and > upon opening it, initially, it tries to find a "Sent" Items folder under > IMAP to send from. To this end I have traditionally gone into the > dialogue box that opens, click on the IMAP account to receive a list of > possible folders, but it now immediately crashes indicating Outlook has > had an error, and it all goes to hell from there. Outlook then cannot > open but keeps crashing with its "unknown error". > Up to last week at another site with Windows Live Mail, this was not an > issue. Just a shot in the dark, but have you enabled the workarounds? http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Clients Some clients like, like Outlook, have known problems which dovecot can dance around. in 20-imap.conf # Workarounds for various client bugs: # delay-newmail: # Send EXISTS/RECENT new mail notifications only when replying to NOOP # and CHECK commands. Some clients ignore them otherwise, for example OSX # Mail (<v2.1). Outlook Express breaks more badly though, without this it # may show user "Message no longer in server" errors. Note that OE6 still # breaks even with this workaround if synchronization is set to # "Headers Only". # tb-extra-mailbox-sep: # Thunderbird gets somehow confused with LAYOUT=fs (mbox and dbox) and # adds extra '/' suffixes to mailbox names. This option causes Dovecot to # ignore the extra '/' instead of treating it as invalid mailbox name. # tb-lsub-flags: # Show \Noselect flags for LSUB replies with LAYOUT=fs (e.g. mbox). # This makes Thunderbird realize they aren't selectable and show them # greyed out, instead of only later giving "not selectable" popup error. # # The list is space-separated. imap_client_workarounds = delay-newmail Joseph Tam <jtam.home(a)gmail.com>

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