September 2025 - dovecot

doveadm sync issue
by Dan Whitehouse 27 Sep '25

27 Sep '25

Hi, I am running Dovecot on Debian trixie (dovecot-core/stable,now 1:2.4.1+dfsg1-6 amd64). Under the previous version, which I believe was 2.3, I was able to run a sync script with the following syntax: doveadm sync -u <user> remote:<user>@<host.tld> This worked very well and I was able to sync my mail. Having upgraded, this syntax produces the following error: dsync-server: invalid option -- ‘U' Error: doveadm: Unexpected or incomplete option: -U Even though my script doesn’t pass “-U” explicitly I believe that it is passed internally: https://github.com/dovecot/core/blob/main/src/doveadm/doveadm-settings.c#L1… core/src/doveadm/doveadm-settings.c at main · dovecot/core github.com Confusingly the online help still displays: doveadm dsync-server —help doveadm dsync-server [-r <rawlog path>] [-T <timeout secs>] [-U] Here we can see that the “-U” option (despite all the above) appears to have been removed from the code: https://github.com/dovecot/core/commit/4c04e4c30fd4817a8b0e11d04d9681173f69… global: Remove replicator · dovecot/core@4c04e4c github.com I have added the following to /etc/dovecot/local.conf: dsync_remote_cmd = "ssh -l%{login} %{host} doveadm dsync-server -u%{user}” (Note that I override the “-U”) and sync once again works properly. Many thanks for your attention, Dan Whitehouse

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2.4.1 Config woes
by Anthony Mellor 27 Sep '25

27 Sep '25

Hi, greetings Do sing out please if this is the wrong place or style for this mailing list, please - and there's a community somewhere isn't there? spent days not succeeding with these configs. I'm a new install on Trixie and Dovecot 2.4.1 and going round in many circles with nano /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/auth-sql.conf.ext nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf MariaDB having tried one million variations of this, so this is just one, being the latest suggestion # Declare named instances of passdb/userdb using the SQL driver passdb sql { } userdb sql { } # Passdb (authentication) SQL settings passdb_sql_driver = mysql # MariaDB uses "mysql" passdb_sql_host = 127.0.0.1 # or: /run/mysqld/mysqld.sock passdb_sql_port = 3306 passdb_sql_dbname = maildb passdb_sql_user = dovecot passdb_sql_password = CHANGEME # Choose the scheme to match your DB: # - MD5-CRYPT for $1$... hashes or {MD5-CRYPT} prefix # - PLAIN-MD5 for 32-hex unsalted MD5 passdb_sql_default_pass_scheme = MD5-CRYPT passdb_sql_password_query = \ SELECT username AS user, password \ FROM users \ WHERE username = '%u' (thought this is now changed) # Userdb (user lookup) SQL settings userdb_sql_driver = mysql userdb_sql_host = 127.0.0.1 userdb_sql_port = 3306 userdb_sql_dbname = maildb userdb_sql_user = dovecot userdb_sql_password = CHANGEME # Must return at least uid, gid and home or mail userdb_sql_user_query = \ SELECT \ 5000 AS uid, 5000 AS gid, \ home, \ CONCAT('maildir:', maildir) AS mail \ FROM users \ WHERE username = '%u' (thought this is now changed) I have never used Dovecot before this install ten days ago - any example files that work will be forever gratefully appreciated to give me a basic starting point. Very frustratingly at one 3am morning I did get it working and the lost it. a t b Anthony _______________________________________________ dovecot mailing list -- dovecot(a)dovecot.org To unsubscribe send an email to dovecot-leave(a)dovecot.org

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2.4.1 Config woes
by Anthony Mellor 27 Sep '25

27 Sep '25

Hi, greetings Do sing out please if this is the wrong place or style for this mailing list, please - and there's a community somewhere isn't there? spent days not succeeding with these configs. I'm a new install on Trixie and Dovecot 2.4.1 and going round in many circles with nano /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/auth-sql.conf.ext nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf MariaDB having tried one million variations of this, so this is just one, being the latest suggestion # Declare named instances of passdb/userdb using the SQL driver passdb sql { } userdb sql { } # Passdb (authentication) SQL settings passdb_sql_driver = mysql # MariaDB uses "mysql" passdb_sql_host = 127.0.0.1 # or: /run/mysqld/mysqld.sock passdb_sql_port = 3306 passdb_sql_dbname = maildb passdb_sql_user = dovecot passdb_sql_password = CHANGEME # Choose the scheme to match your DB: # - MD5-CRYPT for $1$... hashes or {MD5-CRYPT} prefix # - PLAIN-MD5 for 32-hex unsalted MD5 passdb_sql_default_pass_scheme = MD5-CRYPT passdb_sql_password_query = \ SELECT username AS user, password \ FROM users \ WHERE username = '%u' (thought this is now changed) # Userdb (user lookup) SQL settings userdb_sql_driver = mysql userdb_sql_host = 127.0.0.1 userdb_sql_port = 3306 userdb_sql_dbname = maildb userdb_sql_user = dovecot userdb_sql_password = CHANGEME # Must return at least uid, gid and home or mail userdb_sql_user_query = \ SELECT \ 5000 AS uid, 5000 AS gid, \ home, \ CONCAT('maildir:', maildir) AS mail \ FROM users \ WHERE username = '%u' (thought this is now changed) I have never used Dovecot before this install ten days ago - any example files that work will be forever gratefully appreciated to give me a basic starting point. Very frustratingly at one 3am morning I did get it working and the lost it. a t b Anthony

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Slow inbox
by Rupert Gallagher 26 Sep '25

26 Sep '25

Hello, I note the following problem. If the inbox holds many subfolders with mail, thunderbird spends a lot of time on startup. To mitigate the problem, I asked users to keep the inbox clear of subfolders. However, a user keeps ignoring the local policy while also lamenting the mail is slow. Please write instructions to enforce this local policy in dovecot, so that when users try to create an inbox subfolder, dovecot refuses the action. Thank you

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Dovecot and iOS 26 Mail.app
by Florian Effenberger 25 Sep '25

25 Sep '25

Hello, with the release of iOS 26, I had a look again at the infamous issue regarding Apple‘s Mail.app with Dovecot, when folder content does not reliably sync or mail content is not fully loaded. Some made a workaround by disabling pipelining (I didn‘t), and some pointed out Stalwart implemented some changes to work around the issue. A year ago, this was also prominently featured at Heise at least. I am not sure this is still a recent issue, but I wanted to share my findings. I have two different mail accounts on two different servers which have also different configurations. At least with iOS 26 I discovered that once the secondary mail account is added, both accounts suffer from the same problem again. The mere fact that I have two accounts is not the issue, because the secondary account also doesn’t work when the primary is disabled, but the other way round things have been working fine for at least a few days now. I assume that hiccups on one account affect both somehow. I did not yet get to compare the system configuration as to why the secondary account has hiccups, but maybe it helps those who debug the issue to reproduce it. Florian

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Permissions Issues with shared Mailboxes, Unix Permissions and ACL
by fc26wuqa＠studserv.uni-leipzig.de 24 Sep '25

24 Sep '25

Hi, I use pam_ldap.so to use LDAP to authenticate my users. I don't use virtual accounts, but every account is a unix account. I use a post login script to export the `ACL_GROUPS` variable to hold all unix groups the user belongs to. Each group corresponds to a shared mailbox, where UNIX group permission handle which user gets access to the mailbox. Recently I added acl files to the shared mailboxes that look like: `group=some_group kxeilprwts` The Permissions of the user Mailboxes are generally 0700 and 0770 for shared mailboxes. The namespace of the shared Mailboxes looks something like: `type=shared, prefix=Shared/%%u/ location= maildir:/somewhere/'%%d/%%n/Maildir:INDEX=/srv/mails/%d/%n/Maildir/shared/%%u` Everything works fine, except my log gets flooded with messages saying: `open(/path/to/shared/mailbox) failed: Permission denied` and `opendir(/path/to/shared) failed: Permission denied, missing +x perm, we're not in group`. The user should also not be in the group. This is also reproducible when I do `doveadm mailbox list -u some_unix_user`, where dovecot tries to list all of the mailboxes, even though the user does not have permissions to do so. Referenced here: https://doc.dovecot.org/main/core/config/shared_mailboxes.html it says "Dovecot assumes that it can access the other users' mailboxes". So should I just ignore the messages/write a syslog filter for them? How can I prevent dovecot from checking every shared mailbox, even though they don't have access to it?

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LDAP AD Quota override not working
by wt.forsaken＠gmail.com 23 Sep '25

23 Sep '25

Hi there, I'm testing the new version of Dovecot 2.4 in Debian 13 before upgrading to my customers and I'm having difficult on trying to override the user's quota. The LDAP base is from Samba4 AD and having been trying the following configuration: auth-ldap.conf.ext: ldap_uris = ldap://localhost ldap_auth_dn = cn=admin,dc=localdomain ldap_auth_dn_password = password ldap_base = ou=users, dc=localdomain passdb ldap { filter = (&(objectClass=person)(sAMAccountName=%{user})) bind = yes fields { userdb_quota_storage_size = %{ldap:telephoneNumber}B } } userdb prefetch { driver = prefetch } userdb ldap { fields { quota_storage_size = %{ldap:telephoneNumber}B } } 90-quota.conf mail_plugins { quota = yes } quota "User quota" { } quota_storage_size = 40M Since there is no quotaBytes in Samba AD, I'm testing to map the telephoneNumber parameters to override the quota, also I'm just testing a 40M to see how it works. Roundcube webmail can see the quota being overriden in its inferior bar, but when I send an email to the user which is above the quota, the journal log inform "failed to store into mailbox 'INBOX': Quota exceeded (mailbox for user is full)". I don't know how to override the quota, since in passdb section I used the "userdb_" prefix but it is not being passed to userdb when I input the "doveadm user ..." command. I don't know if I have been clear in my request, but I'd appreciate any help.

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lib-sieve segfaults
by Alexander Gerasiov 23 Sep '25

23 Sep '25

Hi there, Just found wrong error handling (null pointer dereference) in lib-sieve How to reproduce: Enable global storage and try to check (via manage sieve api) require ["include"]; include :global "non exist script"; Here is a fix: https://github.com/dovecot/pigeonhole/pull/17 -- Best regards, Alexander Gerasiov Contacts: e-mail: a(a)gerasiov.net WWW: https://gerasiov.net TG/Skype: gerasiov PGP fingerprint: 04B5 9D90 DF7C C2AB CD49 BAEA CA87 E9E8 2AAC 33F1

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2.3 to 2.4 unusual config
by Laura Steynes 22 Sep '25

22 Sep '25

We have two main mail server system, our broadband users on one, and, our hosting clients on another, because of the large number of customers on both, we use the following formats, I am looking at adding one dovecot 2.4 front end to the farm to see how it will perform, but with a such a complete rewrite requiring variable entry like we are all C programmers who understand code, which we are not and do not, I'm having headaches getting my head around how to convert these to this new weird format Broadband Users: jcitizen(a)example.net = /vmail/example.net/j/c/i/jcitizen mail_location = maildir:/vmail/%Ld/%1Ln/%1.1Ln/%2.1Ln/%Ln/Maildir Hosting Clients: jcitizen(a)example.net = /vmail/e/x/a/example.net/jcitizen mail_location = maildir:/vmail/%1Ld/%1.1Ld/%2.1Ld/%Ld/%Ln/Maildir Any help appreciated, we have no intentions of moving from 2.3.x in any foreseeable future, but if the time comes we must, we want to be able to have a plan to enact. -Loz We have two main mail server system, our broadband users on one, and, our hosting clients on another, because of the large number of customers on both, we use the following formats, I am looking at adding one dovecot 2.4 front end to the farm to see how it will perform, but with a such a complete rewrite requiring variable entry like we are all C programmers who understand code, which we are not and do not, I'm having headaches getting my head around how to convert these to this new weird format Broadband Users: [1]jcitizen(a)example.net = /vmail/[2]example.net/j/c/i/jcitizen mail_location = maildir:/vmail/%Ld/%1Ln/%1.1Ln/%2.1Ln/%Ln/Maildir Hosting Clients: [3]jcitizen(a)example.net = /vmail/e/x/a/[4]example.net/jcitizen mail_location = maildir:/vmail/%1Ld/%1.1Ld/%2.1Ld/%Ld/%Ln/Maildir Any help appreciated, we have no intentions of moving from 2.3.x in any foreseeable future, but if the time comes we must, we want to be able to have a plan to enact. -Loz References Visible links 1. mailto:jcitizen@example.net 2. http://example.net/j/c/i/jcitizen 3. mailto:jcitizen@example.net 4. http://example.net/jcitizen

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variable expansion allowed in 'listen' config not working
by publists＠emailgroups.net 20 Sep '25

20 Sep '25

Hi, In a new dovecot 2.4 config I'm setting up a inet_listener for a service. I want to use an env var in `listen` expansion, like service imap-login { inet_listener imaps { listen = %{env:LAN_IPv4}, 127.0.0.1 } } This https://doc.dovecot.org/2.4.1/core/settings/variables.html says "You can use special variables in several places: All settings, except of type String without variables." Reading https://doc.dovecot.org/2.4.1/core/summaries/settings.html#listen `listen` directive allows listen Default *, :: Value IP addresses Unlike, for example deliver_log_format Default msgid=%{msgid}: %{message} Value String without variables which would be disallowed for "String without variables" I CAN use env vars across almost all of my config. But launch systemctl start dovecot fails with dovecot[17358]: Fatal: service(imap-login) Can't resolve address %{env:LAN_IPv4}: Name or service not known OTOH replacing - listen = %{env:LAN_IPv4}, 127.0.0.1 + listen = 10.1.1.1, 127.0.0.1 solves the launch issue. Like I said it works in other stanzas. Am I configuring this right for `listen`? Thanks, Dave

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