- dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] Dovecot response to "FETCH" command
by Alex Tang 04 Mar '05

04 Mar '05

Hi folks. I just converted my site from UW+mbox to dovecot+maildir (stable-test59, 2005/02/25). For the most part, everything is great. The server seems faster and less memory intense than the UW server (this part has made me very happy). And it's definitely more user friendly to me than Courier. There is one thing however... A few of my users are using the web based mail reader (Squirrelmail-1.2.11) that i provide for them. Once i converted to dovecot, the squirrelmail users were reporting that when viewing the folder list page, 2 things were happening: * The date for all of the messages was being displayed as "Sun 4:00 pm" * all messages were shown as being "new". they never would be transferred into the "Seen" state. After doing some IMAP protocol sniffing, i found this difference in the way that the UW server and the dovecot server handles the "FETCH" command... Squirrelmail issues a FETCH command to get message header information like this (lines broken with backslashes for readability): A009 FETCH 1:1 (FLAGS RFC822.SIZE INTERNALDATE BODY.PEEK \ [HEADER.FIELDS (Date To From Cc Subject X-Priority \ Content-Type)]) The UW server returns: * 1 FETCH (FLAGS () RFC822.SIZE 710 \ INTERNALDATE "27-Feb-2005 23:50:42 -0800" \ BODY[HEADER.FIELDS ("DATE" "TO" "FROM" "CC" "SUBJECT" \ "X-PRIORITY" "CONTENT-TYPE")] {153} Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 23:50:42 -0800 From: root <root(a)scorchedearth.us.proofpoint.com> To: altitude(a)scorchedearth.us.proofpoint.com Subject: asdf When the same FETCH response is returned by dovecot, the response looks like this: FLAGS () RFC822.SIZE 3358 INTERNALDATE "27-Feb-2005 07:55:27 -0800") * 1 FETCH (BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (DATE TO FROM CC SUBJECT X-PRIORITY CONTENT-TYPE)] {205} Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:04:22 +0800 From: xxx xxx <xxx(a)xxx.com> To: dovecot(a)dovecot.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Subject: [Dovecot] "not listening" notification I noticed that in the UW response, the "* 1 FETCH ..." is the first line, and contains all of the data except for the message header info. However, in the dovecot response, the data is split into 2 lines, and the first line is not the "* 1 FETCH" line. In reading through the squirrelmail source, squirrelmail is not recognizing this as a valid response, and thus the date, size, and flags are not being properly set in the internal squirrelmail message objects. This explains why both the date as well as the "seen" status of the message is never properly set. OK, after all this blabbing on...here's my question. Is the data being sent back by dovecot a valid response? My knowledge of the IMAP protocol is weak to say the least. I tried reading the IMAP RFC (3501), in particular section 6.4.5 which defines the FETCH command), and the RFC seems to specify that the response should have the "* # FETCH" lines come first. However, the RFC seems vague, and i didn't wade through any of the other RFCs out there. I figure it is legal, since the two other clients i've used seem to understand it just fine (thunderbird/mozilla, mutt). However, could this be the reason why mozilla/thunderbird sometimes gets the message size wrong (and hence why the "tb-negative-fetch" workaround is needed). For now, i'll bang on squirrelmail to support the response sent by dovecot. Thanks. ...alex...

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[Dovecot] hanging imap... and users getting other users' emails!
by Josh Burley 04 Mar '05

04 Mar '05

Hi All, We recently upgraded from UW (boy, starting to sound like a broken record, eh?)... Two problems: 1. Every two or three days users are unable to access their email via IMAP. It seems that it's because dovecot-auth has hung. Has anyone seen anything like this? 2. (the really serious one)... one of our users, "angie" has twice had her Outlook download other users' email! Once as another user, "helene", and just now as "mkarlin". The first time she got 800 of helene's email, and just now, about 30 of mkarlin's.... from our log, I noticed: Mar 2 17:27:10 core imap-login: Login: mkarlin [::ffff:128.195.131.2] Mar 2 17:27:10 core imap-login: Login: mkarlin [::ffff:128.195.131.2] Mar 2 17:27:11 core pop3-login: Login: angie [::ffff:68.231.223.128] Mar 2 17:27:11 core imap-login: Login: mkarlin [::ffff:128.195.131.2] Mar 2 17:27:11 core imap-login: Login: mkarlin [::ffff:128.195.131.2] Our server setup: Fedora Core 3. dovecot-0.99.13. OpenLDAP, and dovecot auth'ing off PAM (mostly default setup, using Mailbox, and mail/ as a subdir). Any ideas? Any more debug info I can supply? .josh

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[Dovecot] Is Dovecot SMP and thread-safe?
by Peter Franck 04 Mar '05

04 Mar '05

Josh´s problem report reminds me of other multi-CPU issues. Just a guess, Peter

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[Dovecot] selective POP3 user
by Barry Kwok 04 Mar '05

04 Mar '05

I want to know if it is possible to limit some users to use POP3 service only in a server running BOTH IMAP and POP3 service. In other words, some users can choose IMAP or POP3 and some users can only use POP3. Barry

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[Dovecot] Several issues with 1.0-stable
by Remy Zandwijk 04 Mar '05

04 Mar '05

All, We have Dovecot 1.0-stable deployed in our 3000 users environment as of last weekend. Up untill now, I have 3 issues: - When stopping Dovecot with: kill -TERM `cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid`, the 'dovecot' process itself dies, the 'imap-login' processes die, but the 'imap' processes (there are a lot of them) don't die, but become a zombie. I think the way I stop Dovecot is the way to do it. The zombies can be killed by doing a 'pkill -9 imap', but that's not quite elegant. - Dovecot is running in a Solaris 9 environment. It turned out that Dovecot crashes when more then 256 filedescriptors are being used. This is rather normal, since Solaris only support 256 descriptors per 32-bit process. After starting Dovecot, I do a 'plimit -n 8192, 8192 `cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid`, which allows Dovecot to have 8192 filedescriptors. Timo, is it possible to introduce a config file option to configure the number of descriptors? - Pine and Outlook users don't see the adresses or names of the people who sent them email. In my email yesterday, I said I remembered that tests with Dovecot 0.99 showed no problems. Today, I installed both Dovecot 0.99 and 1.0-stable on my test box. It turned out that 0.99 indeed works OK and that 1.0-stable is the problem. The user mailboxes are 'Maildir'; we do not use mbox format. I like to see this problem being fixed..... We have 2 namespaces in our setup: the default namespace and a namespace which location is set to ~/.Mailstorage. When not using a prefix in the email client setup, users can make new email folders in the default namespace and the 'Mailstorage' namespace. We want users only to create mail folders in the Mailstorage namespace, not in the default namespace. Questions: - Is it possible to force a prefix to clients? - If not, is it usefull to have an option in the namespace configuration that allows or disallows the creation of mail folder? If so: consider this as a feature request. Thank you for reading, best regards, Remy Zandwijk Free University of Amsterdam The Netherlands

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[Dovecot] Newby Question
by Troy Bull 04 Mar '05

04 Mar '05

Hello I just setup my IMAP server and everything works great, except for 1 small detail. I am upgrading from uwashington's imap server, and in theirs I had to put a directory "mail" in for the imap folder (this is on the client). The problem I have is with dovecot this makes an extra level (I think). So on my server ~/mail is where the mail folder is located, but when the client puts in the "mail" for the imap server directory dovecot looks in and creates folders in ~/.mail/mail. This is a problem for me because I have many clients and I would have to go reconfigure each one. My question is this, is there a way to make dovecot look in ~/ so that when combined with the imap folder from the client it ends up in ~/mail? I hope that is clear enough, I was thinking maybe I need to set default_mail_env, but i have no idea to what? Thanks in advance Troy

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[Dovecot] Trigger getmail via mail-client action?
by Gert Brinkmann 04 Mar '05

04 Mar '05

Hello, I want to use dovecot on my private debian/unstable-system to have the advantages of an IMAP-Server (Access to mails from different computers, Simply changing the mail client). I decided to use dovecot, because I very often have read (in the web) that it should be more simple to configure than other servers. Now I have the following question: I want to use getmail to retrieve mails from my provider's pop3-server. I do have a dial-up-connection that is not online permanently (I do not have a flat rate). I could start a script on ppp's ip-up that periodically invokes getmail and on ip-down to kill it again. But I would prefer to invoke getmail only when I really want it to be run. The ideal solution for me was to invoke getmail when the "Get Mail"-Button of the mail client is pressed. Is this possible? Perhaps there is something like a connection- or refresh-trigger in dovecot? Thank you, Gert

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[Dovecot] Dovecot started by inetd
by Peter Franck 03 Mar '05

03 Mar '05

Is anyone else starting dovecot by inetd on the list? I'm unable to get it running, stupid me. I need help by someone more experienced. Peter

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Re: [Dovecot] Too many open files, etc.
by Remy Zandwijk 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

> a few days ago I switched out UW-server installation to > dovecot 0.99.14 (Solaris 9). There were a few client issues, > but mostly the migration was ok. > > But I have still some questions/problems: > > +) dovecot-auth: ... PAM: pipe() failed: Too many open files > I increased the max. number of open files. Is this normal > behaviour, that more than 512 open files are needed ? Martin, we're dealing with the same problem right now. We are using dovecot 1.0 stable and we migrated last weekend. 32-bit processes in Solaris 9 have 256 filedescriptors avail- able. This seems a bit to small. Using this command to get the number of file descriptors used by dovecot: ls -1 /proc/`cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid`/fd | wc In our enviroment this is currently around 390. You can limit the number of file descriptors per process in Solaris 9. After starting Dovecot, we issued the command: plimit -n 8192,8192 `cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid` This gives Dovecot 8192 filedescriptors. HTH, Remy

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[Dovecot] UID inserted in the middle of mailbox
by Nicolas STRANSKY 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

I'm seeing these with latest 1.0-stable : Feb 27 16:48:12 zamok dovecot: POP3(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /var/mail/**** (176 > 150) Feb 27 16:49:58 zamok dovecot: POP3(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /var/mail/**** (4409 > 4237) Feb 27 16:50:04 zamok dovecot: IMAP(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /var/mail/**** (7122 > 5116) Feb 27 16:50:16 zamok dovecot: IMAP(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /home/****/Mail/trash (15571 > 14535) Feb 27 16:50:16 zamok dovecot: IMAP(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /home/****/Mail/trash (16578 > 14535) Feb 27 16:50:19 zamok dovecot: IMAP(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /var/mail/**** (23318 > 13713) -- Nico L'étude approfondie de la nature est la source la plus féconde des découvertes mathématiques. -+- Joseph Fourier -+-

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