- dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailServerOverview contains poppycock
by William Blunn 22 Mar '11

22 Mar '11

Just having another look at http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailServerOverview , it seems to have some statements in it which are misleading, and some which are really ... well ... wrong. Quote: "With the possible, optional, exception of the deliver MDA, Dovecot is not involved with reception, delivery, and storage of mail. That function is provided by a MTA such as postfix <http://www.postfix.org>. It is the MTA that determines where and how mail is stored - Dovecot must then be configured to retrieve the mail accordingly." (Entered by user "amfes".) This contains a significant proportion of poppycock. Dovecot includes extensive functionality for the storage (as in the action of storing) of e-mail as well as retrieval, in the shape of the LDA. Using Dovecot's LDA is /required/ in the case of Dovecot-specific mail storage formats (sdbox, mdbox). With mbox, use of the Dovecot LDA is advisable since it will guarantee a locking strategy which is compatible with Dovecot's mail retrieval functionality. And in any case, use of the Dovecot LDA has merit in that it should guarantee line-up between the mailstore configurations used for storage and retrieval. It is NOT the MTA that determines where and how mail is stored. It is the PERSON who configures the system who decides this, and codifies that configuration into whatever systems carry out local delivery and retrieval. It IS true that use of Dovecot's LDA is optional, but to say that it is a "possible exception" is misleading. People /should/ use the Dovecot LDA if they are using Dovecot IMAP/POP, and the /option/ is to use the MTA's local delivery system /if/ it is so indicated on a particular system. Quote: "Again, it bears repeating, Dovecot /is not responsible for mail delivery or storage/. Any questions on these issues involve your MTA and MDA. Get those working first." (Entered by user "DanielMiller".) Again, contains quite a lot of misleading nonsense. "Mail delivery" includes the hand-off of the message by the MTA to the LDA, and the storage of the message by the LDA. The LDA should probably be Dovecot, so really Dovecot /is/ partially responsible for mail delivery. "Storage" involves that placing of message into the message store. This should be done by Dovecot, so Dovecot is responsible for this. Bill

2 2

[Dovecot] dsync inbox conversion problem (mbox -> mdbox)
by Sergiy Kyrylkov 22 Mar '11

22 Mar '11

Hi, We are trying to convert all mbox mail on our systems to mdbox using dsync, in order to be able to use email sub-folders in Thunderbird. Everything works fine for non-inbox folders, however the inbox folders are not getting converted. We used: *dsync -v convert mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u* *dovecot --version* 2.0.beta6 (3156315704ef) (shipping with RHEL6/SL6) *dovecot -n* # 2.0.beta6 (3156315704ef): /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf # OS: Linux 2.6.32-71.18.2.el6.i686 i686 Scientific Linux release 6.0 (Carbon) mail_location = mdbox:~/mdbox mbox_write_locks = fcntl passdb { driver = pam } protocols = imap service auth { unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth { group = postfix mode = 0666 user = postfix } } ssl = required ssl_cert = </etc/pki/dovecot/certs/dovecot.pem ssl_key = </etc/pki/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem userdb { driver = passwd } Sergiy

3 3

[Dovecot] Request - please uncomment !include_try /etc/dovecot/local.conf in example config
by Ng Oon-Ee 22 Mar '11

22 Mar '11

Hi, could I request that the example config in doc/dovecot/example-config/dovecot.conf be slightly altered to uncomment the last line? The point of include_try is that it only includes if such a file exists, and doesn't break anything if the file does not exist. My distro (Arch) has a policy not to apply non-essential patches, rather asking users to forward requests upstream, hence this email. It allows users to simply keep a local.conf with all their settings and not have to worry that it would not be used when the dovecot package gets upgraded (which mostly means /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf gets replaced, depending on packaging standards). Thanks.

2 2

[Dovecot] Bug in xi.rename-it.nl/dovecot-2.0.11/debian/watch
by Mark Alan 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

If I am not wrong, debian/watch should be: --- old/dovecot-2.0.11/debian/watch 2011-03-07 17:24:51.000000000 +0000 +++ new/dovecot-2.0.11/debian/watch 2010-12-03 10:04:00.000000000 +0000 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ # watch control file for uscan version=3 # Site Version Script -http://dovecot.org/releases/1.2/dovecot-(.*\.[0-9]+)\.tar\.gz debian uupdate +http://dovecot.org/releases/2.0/dovecot-(.*\.[0-9]+)\.tar\.gz debian uupdate M.

1 0

[Dovecot] dovecot proxy, imapproxy, perdition . . . or?
by Lorens Kockum 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Hi, I have two load-balanced dovecot servers using a single NFS mount. The version is 1.2.11. I chose this so that if one server goes down the other will take up the load, and if my load is too much for one server I just have to add more identical servers. It works, but I wish to move to SAN storage because the NFS server is exhibiting irregular performance. (I spent a lot of time with tcpdump to check that it wasn't NFS locking problems). Performance is very important to me, not in the sense of many users but in the sense of quick response time, since the main use is as a webmail backend. That means that instead of load-balancing connections between servers I will have to partition users between servers (all on one to begin with) and direct users to the corresponding server. I expected to use perdition, but when reading up on that I found imapproxy, which could be interesting for performance reasons, and also that dovecot has an included proxy, and that its performance is better than perdition. However on http://wiki.dovecot.org/HowTo/ImapProxy the feature "IMAP/POP3 server with proxy feature" is noted as "This model is still a bit unfinished in current code." Is this still true? There's also a general note that "This page was written quite a long time ago and may not match reality anymore" . . .

3 2

[Dovecot] questions/problems virtual plugin pop3 leave copies on the server for x days then delete
by Robert Schetterer 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Hi Timo, i allready asked about this , and did some fixes , but it isnt working yet ,as far i have a setup like namespace default { # type = private separator = / prefix = "" list = yes # hidden = no subscriptions = yes } namespace virtual { # type = private prefix = "virtual/" separator = / location = virtual:/etc/dovecot/virtual:LAYOUT=maildir++:INDEX=~/virtual hidden = yes list = no subscriptions= no } namespace real { # type = private prefix = "RealMails/" separator = / list = no hidden = yes } pop3_enable_last = yes pop3_reuse_xuidl = no pop3_uidl_format = %g pop3_logout_format = top=%t/%p, retr=%r/%b, del=%d/%m, size=%s mail_max_userip_connections = 100 mail_plugins = expire virtual quota mail_log fts fts_squat notify pop3_client_workarounds = outlook-no-nuls oe-ns-eoh RealMails/ RealMails/* -RealMails/Trash -RealMails/Trash/* -RealMails/Sent -RealMails/Sent/* -RealMails/Templates -RealMails/Templates/* -RealMails/Drafts -RealMails/Drafts/* -RealMails/Archives -RealMails/Archives/* unseen normally this works as expected some users want to use leave copies messages on the server for x days then delete via pop3 i tested this with thunderbird and looked into the maildir, it seems that the mails stay in "new" folder of the maildir after i downloaded via pop3 ( i am not sure is this expected ? , i would thought they get to cur ) thunderbird does not download this mails again ( good ), but it doesnt delete them from maildir new ever( bad ) , so the whole leave copy and delete after x days function pop3 is not working i am not quite sure if there is relation to virtual namespaces ( which i like to use in future too ) , but have to renable this feature working any idea? -- Best Regards MfG Robert Schetterer Germany/Munich/Bavaria

2 14

[Dovecot] Virtual and system users with public mailboxes
by kshaw＠kendallshaw.com 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Hi, I am running dovecot 1.2.9 and postfix, and I am trying to setup a public mailbox. My thought is that there would be one system user with a sieve script to deliver messages to the public mailbox. And, I would like to give virtual users access to the mailbox. On this list, I read how you can have both system and virtual users by using passdb and static userdbs. But, I don't understand how this can be combined with namespaces, where I specify the location. For all virtual users I had: mail_location = maildir:/var/somewhere/%u/maildir/ I think I need that for virtual users and: maildir:~/Maildir for the system users. namespace private { location = ? # how do I have the location be different for system and virtual users? } namespace public { location = ? # ditto (for the index)? } Kendall

3 3

[Dovecot] maildir location
by upen 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Hello, I am trying to use dovecot (v. 2.0.11) and postfix (v. 2.7.3) together. The email server is an ldap client and user's home directories on NFS server are mounted using autofs. As I understand, Maildir performance is better than mbox type, so I'd like to use Maildir instead of mbox. However, when I checked conf.d/10-mail.conf file, there is mail_location = maildir:~/.maildir already configured in it which means user's email will reside in their home directories on the NFS server rather than being on Email server's local storage where plenty of space is available. I anticipate due to NFS there will again be a performance hit . Question : Can I change mail_location for maildir to be somewhere other than ~/.maildir. ( like /var/mail/%u/Maildir, where /var/mail is local storage). There are about 200 ldap users who will be using this email server through squirrel-mail or access them through email clients. By the way, I am confused about one setting in postfix : home_mailbox = .maildir/ in main.cf . Does this really play any role? If so, which parameter should be changed and to what and with what permissions to the new directory. Hope I was able to explain, if not please let me know for more details.. Thanks, U

4 9

[Dovecot] Can't disable chroot to 'empty' dir, but need to... how to do it?
by Tim Bessie 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Hello all... I've installed dovecot on my ISP's shell server, and am using SSH tunnelling so that I can retrieve my mbox-format mail from procmail-processed mailboxes on that server (normally I just ssh there and read them locally with pine, but now that I have a phone with an IMAP client, I wanted to be able to read it more easily there). The problem I'm having is, although it's working, whenever dovecot starts up, or I try to log in, it attempts to chroot to /home/mydir/dovecot/var/run/dovecot/empty (where /home/mydir/dovecot is the path to my dovecot installation). I've turned off all chroot'ing in all the config files, but it still seems to want to chroot to that one directory. The message I see in the log is: Mar 19 02:09:43 master: Info: Dovecot v2.0.11 starting up (core dumps disabled) Mar 19 02:09:44 anvil: Fatal: chroot(/home/mydir/dovecot/var/run/dovecot/empty) failed: Operation not permitted Mar 19 02:09:44 master: Error: service(anvil): command startup failed, throttling This doesn't cause a problem accessing my mail, but it DOES seem to wait 60 seconds between attempts at chroot'ing, so logins to the server take that long (until the chroot fails). Is there any way I can disable this? Again, I've followed the instructions and set 'chroot=' (empty) for all services, but that hasn't helped. - Tim

2 1

[Dovecot] Problem with pam-auth and winbind
by pk10＠ksiaznica.torun.pl 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Hi I try to use windbind rule to authenticate users in dovecot login procedure. /etc/nsswitch.conf file: passwd: files winbind shadow: files winbind group: files winbind Configuration of the dovecot is follows: log_path: /var/log/dovecot/error.log info_log_path: /var/log/dovecot/info.log protocols: imap imaps pop3 pop3s ssl_cert_file: /etc/pki/tls/certs/dovecot.pem ssl_key_file: /etc/pki/tls/private/dovecot.pem login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login login_executable(default): /usr/lib64/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(imap): /usr/lib64/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(pop3): /usr/lib64/dovecot/pop3-login mail_executable(default): /usr/lib64/dovecot/imap mail_executable(imap): /usr/lib64/dovecot/imap mail_executable(pop3): /usr/lib64/dovecot/pop3 mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/lib64/dovecot/modules/imap mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/lib64/dovecot/modules/imap mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/lib64/dovecot/modules/pop3 auth default: mechanisms: plain login use_winbind: yes passdb: driver: pam args: dovecot userdb: driver: passwd socket: type: listen client: path: /var/spool/postfix/private/auth mode: 432 user: postfix group: postfix and configuration of the /etc/pam.d/dovecot is follows: #%PAM-1.0 auth required pam_env.so debug auth sufficient pam_winbind.so #auth sufficient pam_unix.so likeauth nullok use_first_pass auth required pam_deny.so # when I try logon from my console: # telnet komp14 110 Trying 10.10.10.38... Connected to komp.xxx.xxx (10.10.10.38). Escape character is '^]'. +OK Dovecot ready. user tt1 +OK pass xxxxxxxxx -ERR Authentication failed. quit +OK Logging out Connection closed by foreign host. Of course password is corret becouse #wbinfo -K tt1 Enter tt1's password: plaintext kerberos password authentication for [tt1] succeeded (requesting cctype: FILE) credentials were put in: FILE:/tmp/krb5cc_0 In the logs files I can find coresponding to the telnet command to dovecot: /var/log/auth.log Mar 14 09:43:22 komp14 dovecot-auth: pam_winbind(dovecot:auth): getting password (0x00000000) Mar 14 09:43:22 komp14 dovecot-auth: pam_winbind(dovecot:auth): user 'tt1' granted access /var/log/dovecot/info.log Mar 14 09:43:29 pop3-login: Info: Aborted login (auth failed, 1 attempts): user=<tt1>, method=PLAIN, rip=10.10.10.38, lip=10.10.10.38, secured I'll be apreciate for any hints. but in /var/log/dovecot/error.log we have information: Mar 14 09:43:29 auth-worker(default): Error: pam(tt1,10.10.10.38): pam_acct_mgmt() failed: Authentication failure This test was done with windbindd Version 3.5.3. When I test it on another machine with windbind Version 3.0.24 (config file are the same) authentication prosess is done properly. Any HINTS????

2 1