July 2022 - dovecot - dovecot.org

User authentication / activity log
by Karl Denninger 07 Jul '22

07 Jul '22

I'm on 2.3.19.1 (9b53102964) running on FreeBSD, if it matters. I have a set of maintenance "things" that I want to have happen if someone does not authenticate against Dovecot (to check mail) after some period of time. I was running the Z-Push exchange server, which (as its in PHP) made sticking an "you were here" flag in the user's filesystem easy, which of course means checking it is easy since the modification time on the file is sufficient. I was looking for something similar that I could use with Dovecot and my first thought was the cache or index files, but as it turns out local delivery (I'm running Postfix) updates those, so they're not left alone if no client is connected. I also don't see anything appropriate in the syslog that dovecot dumps into there I can scan for on a sign-in. My auth mechanism is "straight" login, no LDAP or similar, and I use pam as the mechanism. I don't see anything in the auth.log file or dovecot's logs. My authentication section for dovecot is pretty-basic: auth_mechanisms = login disable_plaintext_auth = yes passdb { args = session=yes dovecot driver = pam } protocols = imap Does Dovecot maintain something that I can reasonably find in the filesystem for this? A perusal of the documentation doesn't appear to show anything directly pertinent -- but I may have missed it. It appears that the event export capacity might be able to do this but I'm confused on how to set it up; what would be very useful is if, for each user, the log point could be different (e.g. in their home directory) and if it allowed overwriting (thus becoming an activity flag, basically.) Thanks in advance! -- Karl Denninger karl(a)denninger.net /The Market Ticker/ /[S/MIME encrypted email preferred]/

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Case sensitivity and unicode normalisation on ZFS for Dovecot Maildir
by Jørn Åne de Jong 06 Jul '22

06 Jul '22

I'm wondering about some filesystem considerations when using Dovecot. I've read https://wiki.dovecot.org/FileSystems, but that basically talks about low-level details. My question is not about that. I use the following mail_location: maildir:~/maildir:LAYOUT=fs:INBOX=~/maildir/INBOX:UTF-8 In this setup, because I use LAYOUT=fs and UTF-8, the IMAP names are identical to the directory names. I noticed that the INBOX name is case-insensitive, but all other names are case-sensitive. I wonder if it's possible to have consistent behaviour here. Now since I use ZFS, I have the ability to make the filesystem case insensitive and to normalise unicode codepoints. Is that something that would be useful when running a Dovecot server, or would that be a bad idea?

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Trivial Pigeonhole patch: allow X-Original-From header for address tests
by Rob Foehl 04 Jul '22

04 Jul '22

Motivated by more DMARC silliness, naturally. -Rob

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