- dovecot - dovecot.org

[dovecot] pop3: last, and auth plain
by Mark E. Mallett 26 Feb '03

26 Feb '03

Hi- A couple of comments regarding the POP3 server (I realize the POP3 server is probably low priority though..) One problem is that the "LAST" command is not supported. Some mail clients end up downloading all messages every time because of this (or so I'm told). The biggest source of these remarks is people using the yahoo webmail front end. I wonder if this could be added? Also, under BSD/OS, the "auth plain" mechanism doesn't work. Perusing the mailing list archives, I see that the symptoms appear just like those that were reported earlier for another BSD system. I'm curious as to whether there has been any progress on that front? Yours, -mm-

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[dovecot] 0.99.8 released
by Timo Sirainen 25 Feb '03

25 Feb '03

Hope I didn't forget anything :) v0.99.8 2003-02-25 Timo Sirainen <tss(a)iki.fi> * NOTE: Configuration file has changed a bit: auth_userinfo was replaced by userdb and passdb. *_port were merged into *_listen. Disabling listening in imaps port is now done by changing protocols setting. * Maildir: .customflags location has changed for INBOX. If you have set any custom flags, move Maildir/.INBOX/.customflags into Maildir/.customflags or they will be lost. * mbox: Autodetect /var/mail/%u and /var/spool/mail/%u as INBOXes if they're found and mail_default_env isn't set. * passwd-file: File format changed a bit. If you used realm or mail fields, you'll have to fix the file. See doc/auth.txt for description of the format. + Fully featured POP3 server included. Disabled by default. + Support for LITERAL+, MULTIAPPEND, UNSELECT, IDLE, CHILDREN and LISTEXT extensions. + LDAP authentication support. + Internal API cleanups made Dovecot faster and take less memory + auth_verbose logs now all authentication failures + Support for Solaris 9 sendfilev() + New setting: mail_full_filesystem_access allows clients to access the whole filesystem by simply giving the path before the mailbox name (eg. SELECT ~user/mail/box, LIST "" /tmp/%). While this allows users to share mailboxes, it's not recommended since Dovecot's index files can't be safely shared. + New setting: client_workarounds. + Dynamically loadable authentication modules. Binary package builders should consider using it for at least LDAP. + mbox: Content-Length is saved now to each saved message, so it's now safe to have lines beginning with "From ". + mbox: mail_read_mmaped = no works with it now + Indexes can be kept in memory by adding :INDEX=MEMORY to MAIL environment. There's not much point to do this now though, since the UIDs won't be saved. - COPY now behaves as RFC2060 says: "If the COPY command is unsuccessful for any reason, server implementations MUST restore the destination mailbox to its state before the COPY attempt." - LIST and LSUB rewrite, should fix several bugs in them - maildir_copy_with_hardlinks = yes was broken. - mboxes in subfolders weren't selectable. - STORE didn't accept multiple flags without () around them - PLAIN SASL-authentication was a bit broken. - IMAP dates were parsed a few hours wrong - STATUS command removed \Recent flags from messages - Several bugfixes to SEARCH command, especially related to multiple search conditions - If auth/login process died unexpectedly at startup, the exit status or killing signal wasn't logged. - mbox parsing might have crashed sometimes - mbox: when saving mails, internal headers were allowed in input, sometimes causing problems (eg. duplicate headers) when appending and copying messages - mbox: X-Keywords headers were duplicated - Some small fixes to how messages are saved to Maildir - Next command after STARTTLS was ignored which left the connection stuck sometimes - Dovecot was pretty much broken with FreeBSD

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[dovecot] Re: Configuration file format changes
by Timo Sirainen 25 Feb '03

25 Feb '03

On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 02:56, Brad Figg wrote: > Just my $.02 (and that's probably overcharging). Anytime I need > a config file I use XML and an open source parser. I hate XML config files. Not going to happen. Ever. :) I think they're difficult to read with standard text editor. Even more difficult to modify. And creating read-only parser for just about any config file format doesn't take hardly any time. External XML libraries would also annoy people.

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[dovecot] Configuration file format changes
by Timo Sirainen 25 Feb '03

25 Feb '03

After tomorrow's 0.99.8 release I think it's time for a new config file format. It could be made backwards compatibile with the old format, but there would be new tree-like categories. I was thinking something like this: # global settings protocols = imap # "foo.server.org" is just descriptive name # settings inside server { .. } will override global ones. # groups (namespace, login settings, auth settings) aren't replaced # unless same name is used. server foo.server.org { imap_listen = 1.2.3.4 ssl_cert_file = /etc/ssl/certs/foo.cer # default namespace (no name) namespace { type = private mail = mbox:~/mail } # Have to quote so '#' won't be thought out as comment. # I think quoting should work everywhere actually.. namespace "#maildir" { type = private inbox = yes # this namespace contains INBOX mail = Maildir:~/Maildir } # override global auth default auth default { auth_mechanisms = plain digest-md5 auth_realms = foo.server.org auth_userdb = ldap /etc/dovecot-ldap.conf auth_passdb = ldap /etc/dovecot-ldap.conf } } server bar.server.org { imap_listen = 1.2.3.5 ssl_cert_file = /etc/ssl/certs/bar.cer namespace { type = private #mail = #autodetect } # shared mailboxes between users # eg. user/timo.sirainen/some-shared-folder namespace user { type = user mail = /home/%u/mail/shared } } server baz.server.org { imap_listen = 1.2.3.6 ssl_disable = yes # Only Courier-like INBOX namespace namespace INBOX { type = private } } # common namespace between all instances namespace shared { type = shared mail = mbox:/var/lists:INDEX=~/mail/.shared/ } auth default { auth_mechanisms = plain auth_userdb = passwd auth_passdb = pam }

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[dovecot] Maildir plus mbox?
by wolfgang 25 Feb '03

25 Feb '03

is it possible with dovecot to have the inbox in Maildir format and additional imap folders in mbox format? regards, wolfgang

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[dovecot] Re: Trouble setting up dovecot
by Tim Snider 24 Feb '03

24 Feb '03

Thanks Timo, turns out I'm more of a rookie at sysconfiguring than I thought, so perhaps this helps identify stuff that a rookie wouldn't already know...<G> On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 19:46, Timo Sirainen wrote: > > > I've not configured up LDAP on my server yet, so it's just plain PAM for > > now. I'm able to login fine with all my other apps, so I doubt it's a > > problem with PAM, but not impossible. I haven't done anything with PAM > > on this machine yet as it's live. I've been testing things out on > > another machine(NON-SMP/RH8), which I'll try tomorrow if I get a > > chance.) > > You have to have it configured in /etc/pam.d/imap. For example: > > auth required pam_unix.so nullok > account required pam_unix.so Thanks this makes more sense than the options you provide in doc/auth.txt, so you may wish to change that. On both RH7.3 and a RH8.0 box here, I don't have pwdfile, it's apparently been replaced by other functionality. > > > each imap-login is waiting at a read(7, > > That's the problem then. It really shouldn't be blocking there. Could > you get the backtrace to see where it's hanging? ie. run as root: > > gdb /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login <pid of the imap-login> > > and "bt" in it. It's hung up in SSL_CTX_use_PrivateKey() in ssl-proxy-openssl.c, which as you correctly surmised below, is due to a password protected key. I've located and used mkcert.sh. As a note the only docs for doc/mkcert.sh are halfway through the NEWS file and rapidly receeding as you add new releases, (congrats on the fast progress by the way!), however you might consider adding a short note about it to the doc/auth.txt or doc/configuration.txt file for those new to dovecot. > > > I do call fflush() after each write to log. Killing with SIGTERM will do > > > clean exit which may log more things, maybe it's just that? Also killing > > > child processes makes master process log their exits. > > > > I usually note the messages log (watched by a tail -f) show up after I > > kill the dovecot master process.(Kill -9) > > Depends on what the messages are I guess. But if you're kill -9ing the > master process, it's quite likely that the child processes will complain > about losing it. After playing a bit, I think that those messages were due to the kill -9, SIGTERM is nicer. I still end up with little in the way of verbose debugging messages, by my standards. Usually all I see is login and logout messages. Otherwise, I get the occasional lockfile message, which is something that I need to sort out with Exim, and completely on my end. > > dovecot: Feb 20 18:11:51 Info: Dovecot starting up > > imap-login: Dec 31 16:00:00 Fatal: Can't load private key file > > /usr/local/ssl/private/cedarintkey.pem: error:0906406D:PEM > > routines:DEF_CALLBACK:problems getting password > > Err, isn't this the reason why your SSL doesn't work? :) Or was that > just an example? If your private key is crypted with some password, > Dovecot can't use it at least currently.. Correct! Doh! I have been able to use imaps, since I built a non-passworded private key. I was using passworded keys that I'd built for Apache, and would eventually like to have one set of keys that I can reference for each virtual domain. Were you planning on something like the Apache startssl option? I can live with the constraint of one 'connection' key for now. Have you considered allowing each virtual domain to have it's own keys? Kind of difficult as the secure pipe to the server is already in place by the time the login name is seen... Kinda makes it tough for a true virtual presence without explicit assigned IP's. Hmmm, any plans for at least a different keys/identity per IP? If I understand the configuration file for now, it seems to be designed for one cert per machine. Thanks for the help, I've just got to sort out the lockfile differences between Exim and Dovecot and I should then be functional. After that I'll start using LDAP. TJ

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[dovecot] ./autogen.sh
by Jesse Peterson 23 Feb '03

23 Feb '03

CVS update @ Sat Feb 22 15:14:52 PST 2003 When ./autogen.sh is run, I get: src/Makefile.am:5: required directory src/lib-settings does not exist Just thought someone would want to know. - Jesse

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[dovecot] Trouble setting up dovecot
by Tim Snider 21 Feb '03

21 Feb '03

Hi, I'm new to the list but have been trying to get dovecot configured for the past week and a bit. I've gone through the list archives and solved a few of my problems, but most don't seem to be addressed. First off I want to say thanks for starting this project, I've been hoping that someone would start an IMAP/POP server with some flexibility in the way it's configured and provides both packages in one.I've tried setting up Courier once and found it onerous, UW was easier but forces a bunch of assumption that don't suit the way I wanted to configure virtual mail. I'd love to run dovecot, eventually with LDAP and Jamm, and Exim to handle my virtual domains, however I'm running into a fair number of problems and haven't had any luck getting past them. I'm running a RedHat 7.3 SMP server, with iptables for a firewall, so I've got several cards and thus IPs.I started out with dovecot 99.4 but noted that it was missing the LDAP, tried 99.8-test5 and am now working with 99.8-test7, both seem to have the same problems. I'm currently trying to setup a IMAP server on the inside of the firewall, 192.168.2.X. If I use just imap, turn of SSL/TLS I'm fine, and can do plaintext authentication via shadow, but I can't get PAM authentication working. If I turn on SSL(ssl_disable = no), neither the imap or the imaps respond and a netstat -tp shows that no process owns the socket PID/process = '-', often with characters in the Recv-Q. I've tried turning on all the debugging flags for configure on, --with-rawlog --enable-debug --enable-asserts --with-ssl=openssl as well as verbose_proctitle = yes, and auth_verbose = yes, setup logfiles /var/log/dovecot/messages, yet all I get are authorization messages. And I've noted that a number of them only show up after I've killed the dovecot process, so I'm wondering if there needs to be a bit of flushing somewhere? As well I've also tried to run "dovecot -F", with the log files commented out in the .conf file, but get nothing via stderr. I note that when I try the log_timestamp option, the dates sent from imap-login are completely incorrect and don't change, so I don't think the date is being read correctly. Is log_timestamp operational? One thing I'm not clear on is what process to run it under, I've setup a user/group 'dovecot', but does dovecot have to be a member of wheel? I've also noted in earlier versions you had things running via imapd-master, but that now seems to been replaced by "dovecot", is that correct? Is anyone else running dovecot on a SMP system? Any comments or suggestions? I do have development experience, but my Linux/UNIX programming is a bit rusty. I'd love to help make this a rocking product, but need some help getting it dovecot up and running. Any help is appreciated. Thanks, TJ timsn(a)thtree.com http://www.thtree.com/People/TJ/Resume.html

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[dovecot] 0.99.8-test7
by Timo Sirainen 20 Feb '03

20 Feb '03

OK, I really should release 0.99.8 final soon, but not just yet :) Mostly just documentation updates left I think. There's a few recent changes that might have some nasty bugs: - problems with copying messages from mbox to another should be fixed now - LIST and subscription handling rewritten. - "mail_read_mmaped = no" used to corrupt mboxes when expunging messages. It now enabled again by default, and it seems to be working. I did update my backups though :) Dovecot's LDAP support currently requires that it can read the userPassword field of every user. I'm not sure if I should support "authentication binds" that seems to be more standard way to do LDAP authentication. That's just slower, works only with plaintext authentication and makes my code more complex.

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[dovecot] Re: IMAP folder problem
by Kevin Lee 18 Feb '03

18 Feb '03

Hi, I've tried other outlook installs and setting. When I try to copy a folder to the imap account I get... "Can't move the items. The move operation could not be completed. It is possible that the destination server is unavailable or does not support subfolders." And when I try to copy mail to the imap folder (with subscribed folders) I get: "Can't move items. This IMAP command could not be sent to the server before the connection was terminated" I get some corresponding errors in dovecots logs: " imap-master: Feb 18 18:31:41 Error: child 60038 (imap) killed with signal 6 imap((null)): Feb 18 18:33:49 Panic: file cmd-append.c: line 25 (validate_args): assertion failed: ((unsigned int) ret == count) imap-master: Feb 18 18:33:49 Error: child 60042 (imap) killed with signal 6 " related? > On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 18:56, Kevin Lee wrote: > > Hi, > > I have tried multiple dovecot versions (0.99 and CVS) and I keep > > getting the same problem. > > > > I connect to the IMAP server fine using outlook xp, but when I try to create > > folders it creates them and then they just disappear. In the Maildir on the > > IMAP server the folder are there but they don't show up using a client. I > > basically can't do anything with folders, including copying outlook folders > > to the server or create/delete folders. > > Just guessing, but maybe you also have to subscribe to the folders > before they show up in Outlook XP? Also make sure you haven't set > anything to root folder path. I know this to be the case with NS7's mail client. --Ian.

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[dovecot] IMAP folder problem
by Kevin Lee 18 Feb '03

18 Feb '03

Hi, I have tried multiple dovecot versions (0.99 and CVS) and I keep getting the same problem. I connect to the IMAP server fine using outlook xp, but when I try to create folders it creates them and then they just disappear. In the Maildir on the IMAP server the folder are there but they don't show up using a client. I basically can't do anything with folders, including copying outlook folders to the server or create/delete folders. And when I move mail to specific folders using procmail it just gets put back into the inbox again... I'm using freebsd 4.7-RELEASE My config file only adds the following lines... auth = plain auth_methods = plain auth_userinfo = password-file /etc/passwd.imap auth_user = root My password file (/etc/passwd.imp) only consists of kev:XXXXXchangedXX[13]:1001:1001::/home/kev:::: I've just created a folder /home/kev/Maildir where dovecot created the MailDir hierarchies. Any help would be appreciated. Cheers Kev

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[dovecot] mbox vs maildir debate (was re: subject concerning binc imap, even though my original message never touched on it or maildir)
by Ian R. Justman 18 Feb '03

18 Feb '03

Tried sending this message with the original topic On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote: > Hi, Ian. Cross-posting discussions like this is usually not appreciated > by those who subscribe to both foras, so I'll limit it to the Dovecot > list. Mea culpa. That was an inadvertent mess-up on my part; I did not see the headers, usually going by the list's reply-to headers which are usually there, but not this time. I only "cross-posted" it because the first time, it went to the wrong list (the dovecot list was a CC line). I then remailed it to the correct list. I will be more careful in future. > >Basically, if you open via IMAP using a server with a diffent locking > >Additionally, the number of mbox POP3 servers which Do Not Suck(R) is > >rather low right now. Timo finally introduced an mbox IMAP server which > > This I don't agree with. Most existing POP3 servers are quite ok, and > one POP3 Maildir server that is excellent and bug free since 1998, > qmail-pop3d, is quite a piece of art. You are missing my point. I am not talking about POP3 servers in general. See below. > >Not to mention, quite frankly, most mbox POP3 implementations suck > >pretty badly anyway. :P > > This I do agree with. Don't confuse POP3 servers in general with mbox > POP3 servers. The root, the source of the evil is the storage format > mbox. <Rest of argument re mbox vs. maildir removed> I am specifcally targeting mbox POP3 servers, of which there are several implementations; Qpopper, GNU POP3 Server, Cucipop, ipop3d to name a few. I am NOT speaking to maildir, nor to Cyrus, nor to SQL-enabled products. Solely to mbox. In fact, I even said that stuff that talks to maildir, in addition to Cyrus, offered the one thing for IMAP you could not get with mbox until Dovecot came along; something resembling robust dealing with multiple clients to the same mbox store. Nor am I particularly insterested in debating the merits of any format over mbox, a format I have stated I -KNOW- has annoying technical limitations and issues. While I would imagine other formats may have advantages over mbox, I continue to use mbox simply because of the sheer amount of stored mail I have accumulated on all my machines for the past seven years. My point is that Dovecot seems to be the most robust IMAP server I have come across at coping with mbox stores, especially if I am trying to access the same mailbox with two different clients, whether intentionally or inadvertnetly. My hope is that Dovecot's POP3 server will prove just as robust at dealing with mailboxes that may also be open by an IMAP client. Whether Dovecot, BINC IMAP, or even Courier IMAP (or whichever POP3 server for that matter) are better for maildir or anything else, I will leave that debate to those who actually use them. In the end, I have made a choice. Not necessarily the best one, but I made the choice with the full understanding of what that choice would entail. However, you never know. I may change my mind later. ;) --Ian.

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[dovecot] Re: [bincimap] Re: Re: bincimap
by Ian R. Justman 17 Feb '03

17 Feb '03

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote: > >> It even recently included a POP server. What's the reasoning there? > >Someone wanted it so it'd be easy to run both POP3 and IMAP servers > >without having to configure them twice. I don't see any harm in it > >anyway, it took only few hours to write, it's optional and doesn't take > >much space in sources. > > Here's where I would say - there are hundreds of working POP3 servers > around, both in closed and open source, so adding a POP3 server to the > Dovecot project just introduces more lines of code where bugs may appear > ;). Here is what -I- would say: I use mbox on all my servers which I have absolutely no intention of changing despite the issues concerning file locking inherent in the whole mbox format. So please, --NO-- attempts to convince me to go to maildir. My take is that if I am going to use an IMAP server, it would be VERY nice if a POP3 server also came bundled with it. Dovecot's having both IMAP and POP3 servers is great because they will likely use the same file-locking schemes (in fact, probably even share the same locking settings). That way if I inadvertently start up a POP3 session while I am connected via IMAP, if they use identical locking mechanisms, I don't screw up my mailboxes should I inadvertently tell my system that I want to delete the messages from my mailbox. Basically, if you open via IMAP using a server with a diffent locking scheme while your hung POP3 session is still running AND you modify your mailbox, you are screwed. Especially if that mailstore is NFS-shared, which is always a dicey proposition. Additionally, the number of mbox POP3 servers which Do Not Suck(R) is rather low right now. Timo finally introduced an mbox IMAP server which definitely Does Not Suck, notably it allows for multiple clients accessing the same mbox mailstore, something previously only offered by Cyrus and perhaps maildir ("perhaps" only because I do not use maildir). Not to mention, quite frankly, most mbox POP3 implementations suck pretty badly anyway. :P --Ian.

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[dovecot] Re: [bincimap] bincimap
by Timo Sirainen 17 Feb '03

17 Feb '03

On Mon, 2003-02-17 at 11:33, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote: > Binc IMAP's approaches are to use a secure programming language with > secure well-known contructs, and with an as-simple-as-possible design, > making it very easy for everyone to grasp how the server works. This will > also help the community find and fix bugs. I kind of agree, but not at the expense of security. I have tried to keep my code clean and ugly-optimization-free anyway. > Here's where I would say - there are hundreds of working POP3 servers > around, both in closed and open source, so adding a POP3 server to the > Dovecot project just introduces more lines of code where bugs may appear > ;). Yes, and I wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been so easy. I don't really encourage people to use it anyway, it's even disabled by default. If it has bugs, it doesn't affect the IMAP side. If people really need to run both IMAP and POP3 servers, it is simpler to use the same configuration for both, especially if the configuration isn't "standard" (eg. LDAP or SQL authentication, mailboxes in special locations, etc). All other major IMAP servers provide their own POP3 servers as well, if you haven't noticed :) > Donald Knuth said in a seminar that I attended that the best way to keep a > program free from bugs it to complete it. Finish off the project, work on > fixing bugs. That's Binc IMAP's philosophy. That's the ideal situation, and even possible if you keep the original goals. But there are IMAP extensions which may require large changes, new mail storage formats and ways to deliver mail into them, clustering, etc.

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[dovecot] Re: bincimap
by Timo Sirainen 17 Feb '03

17 Feb '03

On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 02:54:47PM +0100, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote: > I can change the words in the FAQ if you feel offended by it, but you'll > have to address points individually. I never made remarks about your > personal code conventions, and I never claimed that my server "focuses on > security" in the extent that Dovecot does. > > If you want to discuss our different designs, please do it seriously, > point for point, and don't just troll around like this. Sorry, I just got a bit disappointed after reading the the web page first. Your lines of code comparisions just seemed to imply that your server does everything that others would but with only a fraction of code. There was also something about Dovecot's design being too complex, so I thought you might have solved those problems more elegantly. When you write something from scratch, I think it's a good idea to design it so that it's superior to existing implementations in at least some ways, not just make a clone with slightly different coding style. If all you wanted was a clone with some changes (and better maintainer), forking the project would be much smaller job. Well, here's some design thoughts: Maildir implementation could be hidden behind a class to access it. That would keep the ugly details hidden from the rest of the code, as well as allow easily implementing other mail storages. Restricting yourself to only plaintext authentication doesn't sound very good plan. Separating the pre-login process from post-login process would probably be a good idea to keep their functionality completely separated. It would also be easier to audit the pre-login code if you knew exactly what there is. After logging in, you could just exec() the post-login process. Don't use sprintf(). > Actually I don't get why you guys CC'd me personally on this. If you have > anything in particular you want to discuss you can post it to the mailing > list. I just thought you'd rather want to see it now than months later in google. I know I would. I didn't think it was really relevant to your mailing list, but if you say so..

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[dovecot] Re: [bincimap] Re: Re: bincimap
by Timo Sirainen 17 Feb '03

17 Feb '03

On Mon, 2003-02-17 at 08:28, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote: > I wonder what the motives for the author of Dovecot IMAP was when he > started his project. Lack of securely written code in other servers, although Courier did prove to be quite secure after all. > I wouldn't want to comment on Dovecot's design, since I'm no fan of > trolling. I don't think commenting is trolling, as long as there's truth in it, or at least honest opinions. > The project clearly has different goals than Binc. Dovecot wants > excellent features, indexing and an advanced security promoting design. Implementation security as well. I'm not sure about features. It's more about trying to be fast and light. Indexes make Dovecot comparable to Cyrus in speed, but updating them isn't required so it's still drop-in replacement for UW imapd and Courier. Index files themselves aren't really required either, but there's no option currently to disable them. > It even recently included a POP server. What's the reasoning there? Someone wanted it so it'd be easy to run both POP3 and IMAP servers without having to configure them twice. I don't see any harm in it anyway, it took only few hours to write, it's optional and doesn't take much space in sources.

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[dovecot] Brain bubbles
by Mark Lancaster 17 Feb '03

17 Feb '03

Hi Bit of a newbie to imap servers re: the article on webmonkey! http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/03/04/index3a_page4.html?tw=backend Been trying to set up SSL support with the latest ver. of dovecote I'm guessing that the following line from STDOUT is the problem. How to fix it is beyond my grasp currently. checking for SSL_read in -lssl... (cached) no Any ideas. ttfn Mark

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[dovecot] 0.99.8-test3
by Timo Sirainen 11 Feb '03

11 Feb '03

It includes full LDAP support now, can anyone test if it really works? It has worked with some of my tests, but I don't know too much about LDAP so I might have missed something important. The authentication problem in test1 and test2 is also fixed now.

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[dovecot] 0.99.8-test2 released
by Timo Sirainen 08 Feb '03

08 Feb '03

Fixes several smaller bugs. Finally works with FreeBSD (tested with 4.7 and 5.0). I think there's still some problems with authentication failing sometimes due to memory/ipc corruption. I haven't seen those today, but I don't think I've fixed that either.. One behaviour change is that if default_mail_env isn't set and mbox format is detected (~/mail dir), /var/mail/user or /var/spool/mail/user is used as INBOX if found.

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[dovecot] About the dovecot package (fwd)
by Jaldhar H. Vyas 07 Feb '03

07 Feb '03

Dear Timo, What do you think of this? Fyi, I've been getting the same thing lately and I'm wondering if gnutls is to blame? (i've had inexlicable SIGSEGVs in other apps before due to it.) Tomorrow I'll try with openssl but I was wondering if you had any other ideas? -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar(a)debian.org> La Salle Debain - http://www.braincells.com/debian/ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Guille -bisho- <bisho(a)eurielec.etsit.upm.es> To: jaldhar(a)debian.org Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 02:08:19 +0100 Subject: About the dovecot package Hello! First of all thanks for maintain such a good imap server. It's trully fast and lightweight!!! I was trying Courier, but it is not very interoperable with others linux tools like procmail and others, and uw-imapd performance was really bad. I only have one problem: If I put a lot of folders to check in mutt the imapd server closes de connection saying in the logs: Jan 31 02:50:25 www imap-login: Login: bisho Jan 31 02:50:44 www imap-master: child 22234 (imap) killed with signal 11 It only happens when mutt is configured with a lot of folders. Maybe covecot loads too much indexes in memory and reachs some limit, but I have readed carefully the conf file and hadn't found anything related. Do you have any thought about that? Thanks a lot again See you -- .,,, Guillermo Pérez -=] 03/02/2003 [=- _' .,,,, - bisho@ ( onirica.com | eurielec.etsit.upm.es ) (v)/ ,'' ( \/ :: "Nuestras mayores tonterias pueden ser muy sabias." :: bisho! ``\\ :: -- Leonardo Da Vinci ::

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[dovecot] Dovecot on FreeBSD
by Karo Salminen 06 Feb '03

06 Feb '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello, I built Dovecot (0.99.5) from Ports on FreeBSD 5.0. The mail client (Kmail) cannot login and it complains that authentication process died. The only thing in the logs is: Feb 2 18:13:01 karo imap-login: Disconnected [client-ip] I tried also passwd authentication method, but its symptoms are the very same. My configure can be found at http://people.jyu.fi/~kaeesalm/dovecot.conf I also tried CVS version in hope of fix and more comprehensive debug messages. The compilation failes when it tries to look for passwd.h even though I set - --disable-passwd and --without-passwd to configure parameters. Could someone fix that. - -- Karo Salminen -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQE+PUX0vt6lNXuj7xcRAp70AJ0R+zhmgF+WBaXaX2V2j+07eVyJRACgh6Ze Pmep2Uy2OnVe/EVuo9O3b80= =eqOO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

3 10

[dovecot] bincimap
by Farkas Levente 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

hi, what do you tyhink about it? especially the faq comment about dovecot? http://www.bincimap.andreas.hanssen.name/ -- Levente "Si vis pacem para bellum!"

3 3

[dovecot] 0.99.8-test1 released
by Timo Sirainen 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

I think all of the reported bugs are again fixed in CVS, so I made a tarball of it. I'd like to hear if there's any problems with it. Here's the most important changes: v0.99.8 2003-02-xx Timo Sirainen <tss(a)iki.fi> * NOTE: Configuration file has changed a bit: auth_userinfo was replaced by userdb and passdb. *_port were merged into *_listen. Disabling listening in imaps port is now done by changing protocols setting. + Fully featured POP3 server included. Disabled by default. + Support for LITERAL+, MULTIAPPEND and UNSELECT extensions. + Internal API cleanups made Dovecot faster and take less memory + auth_verbose logs now all authentication failures + Support for Solaris 9 sendfilev() (not really tested) - COPY now behaves as RFC2060 says: "If the COPY command is unsuccessful for any reason, server implementations MUST restore the destination mailbox to its state before the COPY attempt." - maildir_copy_with_hardlinks = yes was broken. - mboxes in subfolders weren't selectable. - STORE didn't accept multiple flags without () around them - PLAIN SASL-authentication was a bit broken. - IMAP dates were parsed a few hours wrong - If auth/login process died unexpectedly at startup, the exit status or killing signal wasn't logged. - mbox parsing might have crashed sometimes - Next command after STARTTLS was ignored which left the connection stuck sometimes - STATUS command removed \Recent flags from messages - Several bugfixes to SEARCH command, especially related to multiple search conditions

1 0

[dovecot] Recent messages
by Jaime Medrano 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

Dovecot seems to manage \Recent messages in a weird way. When a STATUS command is performed in a mailbox, then the \Recent flag of its messages disappear and latter STATUS commands report that there are no recent messagges. I don't know exactly the behavior of the RFC. But other imap servers (UW-imapd, Netscape Messenger...) report the same number of recent messages when two STATUS commands are performed together. -- Jaime.

2 1

[dovecot] Plain auth broken
by Timo Sirainen 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

On Fri, 2003-01-17 at 14:15, Timo Sirainen wrote: > On Thu, 2003-01-16 at 03:31, james broermann wrote: > > pine still doesn't want to work. It does detect that the server is using > > plain text passwords. I'll try the sniffer and see what turns up. > > Whops, you're right. I've tested pine only with digest-md5 > authentication before. Looks like my PLAIN authentication isn't working > properly. Normally other clients just use LOGIN command which is > different. Patch is now available at http://dovecot.procontrol.fi/

2 7

[dovecot] cvs down?
by Jesse Peterson 24 Jan '03

24 Jan '03

(Logging in to anonymous(a)dovecot.procontrol.fi) CVS password: cvs [login aborted]: connect to dovecot.procontrol.fi:2401 failed: Connection refused cvs [checkout aborted]: connect to dovecot.procontrol.fi:2401 failed: Connection refused Was the CVS server taken down? -- Jesse Peterson / jesse(a)pixeltechs.com

2 1

[dovecot] Unable to Log in on FreeBSD server?
by Mark 21 Jan '03

21 Jan '03

Hello! I recently compiled dovecot 0.99.7 on a FreeBSD 4.3 server, and have been having problems with logging in and password authentication. a. I can't seem to get it to compile MD5 support -- it only seems to support plain, plain-file, and pam. b. Whenever I try to log in, I always get something along the following lines in /var/log/messages .... Jan 16 17:52:15 akira imap-login: close(master) failed: Bad file descriptor Jan 16 17:55:33 akira imap-auth: Userinfo pam doesn't support DIGEST-MD5 method Jan 16 18:08:28 akira imap-master: Login process died too early - shutting down (I also included one about MD5 in there too! :-)) Basically, the imap-login process is dying every time I try to do a login from a remote machine (I've tried Evolution and Outlook Express ....) I've tried telling it to use port 143 and port 993 (where it correctly generates a warning about a certificate that it can't verify, since i created that certificate with mkcert.sh ) Is there something I haven't configured correctly? The only things I've changed in dovecot.conf are: Any suggestions? Thanks, Marc.

2 5

[dovecot] mbox & Maildir
by james broermann 18 Jan '03

18 Jan '03

Hi, Is it possible for a client to read both mbox and Maildir formats from one server running dovecot? Without changing default_mail_env in dovecot.conf, Maildir folders are working ... they're located in ~/Maildir. No /var/mail/username exists. I have mbox format folders in ~/mail and have been trying to get pine to find them by adding pine folder collections. I always end up back in ~/Maildir, though. Thanks, Jim

2 1

[dovecot] 0.99.7 out
by Timo Sirainen 17 Jan '03

17 Jan '03

This one seems to be actually working. Also rewrote doc/index.txt in case someone is interested.

3 7

[dovecot] 0.99.6 buggy
by Timo Sirainen 14 Jan '03

14 Jan '03

Just a note, the hash table code in it was still buggy. Especially with maildir it could leave the processes to infinite loop. Have to think a bit more how to fix this properly..

1 0

[dovecot] security audit of the code
by seth vidal 14 Jan '03

14 Jan '03

Timo, I know that you're taking an effort to make sure that dovecot is written securely, but I was wondering if you've asked any third party to audit the code yet. I don't have the skills necessary to do this but I bet there is someone out there who does and might be willing to do so. -sv

5 7

[dovecot] 0.99.6 released
by Timo Sirainen 13 Jan '03

13 Jan '03

Several bugfixes since 0.99.6rc3. Here's again the change summary since 0.99.5: v0.99.6 2003-01-13 Timo Sirainen <tss(a)iki.fi> + THREAD=REFERENCES extension support. ORDEREDSUBJECT would be easy to add, but I think it's pretty useless. + SORT is much faster now. + mbox: If ~/mail directory isn't found, create it. + Log login usernames * Some coding style changes (less typedefs) - Mails with nested MIME parts might have caused incorrect BODY and BODYSTRUCTURE fetches and sometimes might have crashed dovecot (assert at imap-bodystructure.c). If client had already successfully done the BODY fetching a couple of times, the bug couldn't happen anymore since Dovecot then began caching the BODY data. So, this mostly happened with new users. - non-UID SEARCH might gave wrong replies in certain conditions. - SORT replied always with UIDs instead of sequences. - If authentication was aborted by client ("*" reply to AUTHENTICATE), the login process crashed later. - STATUS command gave invalid reply for mailboxes with spaces in name - Timezones were parsed wrong with message dates - Digest-MD5: We used "qop-options" instead of "qop", which was incompatible with at least Cyrus SASL. - Realms in passwd-file were buggy - Literals didn't work when logging in - Crashed if it had to wait for mbox lock - With invalid configuration auth and login processes were just dying and master filling log files infinitely. - We didn't work with some 64bit systems

1 0

[dovecot] dovecot-0.99.6rc3 compilation problems on (Open|Free)BSD
by Johan Fredin 13 Jan '03

13 Jan '03

Hi there! Dovecot-0.99.6rc3 barfs at me when I try to compile it on OpenBSD 3.2 or FreeBSD 4.7, both with the same error: [ ..snip.. ] gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I../.. -I../../src/lib -g -O2 -Wall -W -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations -Wpointer-arith -Wchar-subscripts -Wformat=2 -Wbad-function-cast -c charset-iconv.c gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I../.. -I../../src/lib -g -O2 -Wall -W -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations -Wpointer-arith -Wchar-subscripts -Wformat=2 -Wbad-function-cast -c charset-utf8.c charset-utf8.c:42: storage size of `ascii_translation' isn't known charset-utf8.c:42: storage size of `utf8_translation' isn't known *** Error code 1 Stop in /usr/home/griffin/dovecot-0.99.6rc3/src/lib-charset. *** Error code 1 Stop in /usr/home/griffin/dovecot-0.99.6rc3/src (line 134 of Makefile). *** Error code 1 Stop in /usr/home/griffin/dovecot-0.99.6rc3 (line 202 of Makefile). *** Error code 1 Stop in /usr/home/griffin/dovecot-0.99.6rc3 (line 330 of Makefile). I didn't use any fancy parameters for ./configure. Any config.* files I can post to help? /Regards, Johan

2 3

[dovecot] 0.99.6rc3
by Timo Sirainen 13 Jan '03

13 Jan '03

Well, "release candidate" wasn't really right name for last two versions. Maybe not for this one either, it has a few changes that could potentially break things badly (new hash table code especially). Anyway, seems to work with me. If I don't see any problems with it for a few days it'll be the final. The really great news is that we support threading. A lot of people have not used Dovecot simply because it couldn't be used for webmails. Hmm. What's the next most important feature? .. Better mbox support? Shared folders? Quota? LDAP/MySQL/etc. authentication? Here's the change summary: v0.99.6 2003-01-xx Timo Sirainen <tss(a)iki.fi> + THREAD=REFERENCES extension support. ORDEREDSUBJECT would be easy to add, but I think it's pretty useless. + SORT is much faster now. + mbox: If ~/mail directory isn't found, create it. + Log login usernames * Some coding style changes (less typedefs) - Mails with nested MIME parts might have caused incorrect BODY and BODYSTRUCTURE fetches and sometimes might have crashed dovecot (assert at imap-bodystructure.c). If client had already successfully done the BODY fetching a couple of times, the bug couldn't happen anymore since Dovecot then began caching the BODY data. So, this mostly happened with new users. - non-UID SEARCH might gave wrong replies in certain conditions. - SORT replied always with UIDs instead of sequences. - If authentication was aborted by client ("*" reply to AUTHENTICATE), the login process crashed later. - STATUS command gave invalid reply for mailboxes with spaces in name - Timezones were parsed wrong with message dates - Digest-MD5: We used "qop-options" instead of "qop", which was incompatible with at least Cyrus SASL. - Realms in passwd-file were buggy - Literals didn't work when logging in - Crashed if it had to wait for mbox lock - With invalid configuration auth and login processes were just dying and master filling log files infinitely. - We didn't work with some 64bit systems

2 4

[dovecot] Failed to create storage
by M 10 Jan '03

10 Jan '03

Hi, I'm impressed so far, I tested this before trying to run it on a mail server and it worked find. However on the mail server with the same config I get the following message when I try and authenticate, and it drops the connection. Failed to create storage with data: mbox:/var/mail/martin The test box is running debian unstable and the mail server is running debian stable so I had to recompile and install. I'm failry sure that I got all the permissions right, I feel like I'm missing something obvious, can anyone advise? The file and permissions on the mailbox look right: -rw-rw---- 1 martin mail 14743740 Jan 10 06:29 /var/mail/martin -- Thanks, M

2 2

[dovecot] Re: Thread extension
by Timo Sirainen 10 Jan '03

10 Jan '03

On Fri, 2003-01-10 at 06:00, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > > Also it looks like I've found a couple of bugs in uw-imap and courier's > > implementation.. > > Something you want to reveal? Well, one was just my misunderstanding of the specs, but another still exists: These should be grouped together, but aren't: Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?foo?= Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?RE=3A_foo?= UW doesn't seem to handle MIME encoded-words properly. I mentioned this already to Mark Crispin who apparently has a lot to do with UW's code. I didn't look too closely at Courier's output, except it was somewhat different from Dovecot's. Also, Crispin said it was totally broken.

1 0

[dovecot] Thread extension
by Timo Sirainen 10 Jan '03

10 Jan '03

Just figured I'd mention that CVS supports now THREAD extension. I also did a bit of benchmarking using a folder with 4685 mails (evolution mailing list): dovecot+mbox: - 0.59s user 0.01s system 98% cpu 0.608 total - malloc() memory usage 45072 -> 825685 dovecot+maildir: - 0.60s user 0.17s system 98% cpu 0.780 total - malloc() memory usage: 45003 -> 825480 Meaning it takes almost 800kbytes of memory and it's quite fast :) Comparing to other servers then: uw-imap: - 1.11s user 0.27s system 100% cpu 1.376 total - malloc() memory usage: 529408 -> ~4348k courier: - 7.27s user 0.28s system 99% cpu 7.567 total - malloc() memory usage: 181689 -> ~850k cyrus: - 1.403 total (through TCP connection, I couldn't figure out how to start it separately) Whoa, we beat everyone :) Courier uses a bit less memory though, but that's most likely because we allocate it in larger chunks which is faster. I ran the tests several times and picked the best values, although the changes were minimal once they got the messages into OS's cache. Also it looks like I've found a couple of bugs in uw-imap and courier's implementation..

1 0

[dovecot] Re: Logging suggestions?
by Jesse Peterson 09 Jan '03

09 Jan '03

-------- Original Message -------- From: - Wed Jan 08 15:28:42 2003 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00800000 Message-ID: <3E1CB429.3040704(a)attbi.com> Date: Wed, 08 Jan 2003 15:28:41 -0800 From: Jesse Peterson <jpeterson275(a)attbi.com> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020901 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Timo Sirainen <tss(a)iki.fi> Subject: Re: [dovecot] Re: Logging suggestions? References: <1042022871.28651.93.camel@hurina> <20030108175006.GB27418(a)dust.uchicago.edu> <20030108181142.GB12010(a)talsever.com> <1042066760.28651.144.camel@hurina> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Timo Sirainen wrote: > > Something like that, yes. I'd like to avoid adding too many (mostly) > useless options though. > Make it customizable! =) Maybe something similar to Apache LogFormat-style or similar? Just a suggestion, -- Jesse Peterson / jesse(a)pixeltechs.com -- Jesse Peterson / jesse(a)pixeltechs.com

1 0

[dovecot] Logging suggestions?
by Timo Sirainen 08 Jan '03

08 Jan '03

Any suggestions how user login/logouts should look like in log files? I was thinking: (connected to imaps port) Login: username [IP 1.2.3.4, imaps, compressed] Logout: username [IP 1.2.3.4, imaps, compressed] [1000/100000 bytes (50%), 00:00:12] Bytes being upload/download and the 50% meaning compression ratio for downloaded bytes, probably not worth it for upload. Or if uncompressed, it'd show the extra space used by SSL/TLS protocol: (using STARTTLS) Login: username [IP 1.2.3.4, TLS] Logout: username [IP 1.2.3.4, TLS] [2020/202000 bytes (101%), 00:00:12] (no SSL) Login: username [IP 1.2.3.4] Logout: username [IP 1.2.3.4] [2000/200000 bytes, 00:00:12] I think the only configuration needed would be if to log login, logout or both.

4 6

[dovecot] Bug#175509: dovecot: init.d script should add some syslog statements on startup/shutdown (fwd)
by Jaldhar H. Vyas 08 Jan '03

08 Jan '03

[Amelia and Timo. As you are both on the dovecot list, I'm replying there to avoid cluttering up your inboxes.] This bug was reported to Debian but I feel it should be fixed upstream. Adding logging in th init script itself would require adding additional dependencies to the package and not be as convenient. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing(a)talsever.com> It would be nice if the init.d script could add some statements in the system log on startup and shutdown. For postfix, postfix-script (called from the init script) uses: starting the Postfix mail system stopping the Postfix mail system These are useful; one can start the daemon and check that it's initialized (netstat works as well, I suppose, but this is still useful docco). -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar(a)debian.org>

2 1

[dovecot] Re: Bug#175507: dovecot: Accidental denial of service via syslog
by Jaldhar H. Vyas 08 Jan '03

08 Jan '03

This bug was reported to Debian but I feel it is an upstream issue. On Sat, 4 Jan 2003, Amelia A Lewis wrote: > If dovecot is misconfigured, such that imap-auth cannot find passwd.imap > (which probably needs to get copied; maybe need more docco in the config > file? This happens if the digest-md5 auth method is uncommented and the > auth_userinfo is set to passwd-file /etc/passwd.imap), imap-auth dies once a > second with error 89, which it reports to imap-master, and both log to > syslog. > > I've got 30,000 line pairs from a ten hour run. I would think that if it > dies more than, say, a thousand times in a single hour, imap-master maybe > ought to consider that there's a serious configuration problem preventing > use, and exit instead of continuing to fill the log. > > Granted, it's a shoot-yourself sort of error. But still ... after a certain > point, the program ought to be able to die *gracefully* if the sysadmin has > shot it, by accident or not. > Personally, I would be even stricter than Amelia is suggesting. If there is a serious configuration error, dovecot should die immediately. -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar(a)debian.org>

2 1

[dovecot] Bug reports from Debian BTS
by Jaldhar H. Vyas 08 Jan '03

08 Jan '03

Timo, Are you (or any other interested list readers for that matter) interested in directly receiving bug reports about dovecot sent to Debian? If you are, you can go to http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/dovecot.html and sign up to have notifications sent to you or the list or wherever. Or I can screen them and only send you ones I think are relevant as I'm doing now. -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar(a)debian.org> It's a girl! See the pictures - http://www.braincells.com/shailaja/

1 0

[dovecot] 0.99.6rc1 released
by Timo Sirainen 07 Jan '03

07 Jan '03

Again rc, just in case I broke something. Or maybe I should just start creating nightly CVS snapshots. Anyway, fixes the few bugs people have reported lately: - Mails with nested MIME parts might have caused incorrect BODY and BODYSTRUCTURE fetches and sometimes might have crashed dovecot (assert at imap-bodystructure.c). If client had already successfully done the BODY fetching a couple of times, the bug couldn't happen anymore since Dovecot then began caching the BODY data. So, this mostly happened with new users. - If authentication was aborted by client ("*" reply to AUTHENTICATE), the login process crashed later. - Digest-MD5: We used "qop-options" instead of "qop", which was incompatible with at least Cyrus SASL. - We didn't work with some 64bit systems - Realms in passwd-file were buggy * Some coding style changes (less typedefs)

2 2

[dovecot] Assert in imap-bodystructure.c
by Brad Figg 06 Jan '03

06 Jan '03

First let me thank you for my initial newby question about poping from a pop3 server and delivering into my Dovecot maildir folders. Now I'm getting an assertion in imap-bodystructure.c and one of my imap folders is now inaccessable. I think the two are related. Whenever I select the folder from my email client (kmail) I get two log entries in the dovecot log of the format: "imap-master: <date>Error: child <pid> (imap) killed with signal 6" Also in the log are several lines with an assertion failure. I've included a portion of the log below. I am running dovecot 0.99.5. Thanks, Brad ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- imap-master: Jan 06 08:38:44Error: child 22222 (imap) killed with signal 6 imap(brad): Jan 06 08:46:28Panic: file imap-bodystructure.c: line 346 (part_write_body): assertion failed: (part->children->next == NULL) imap-master: Jan 06 08:46:28Error: child 22262 (imap) killed with signal 6 imap(brad): Jan 06 08:53:01Panic: file imap-bodystructure.c: line 346 (part_write_body): assertion failed: (part->children->next == NULL) imap(brad): Jan 06 08:53:01Panic: file imap-bodystructure.c: line 346 (part_write_body): assertion failed: (part->children->next == NULL) imap-master: Jan 06 08:53:01Error: child 22273 (imap) killed with signal 6 imap-master: Jan 06 08:53:01Error: child 22270 (imap) killed with signal 6

2 5

[dovecot] Weird problem on Alpha
by Amelia A.Lewis 06 Jan '03

06 Jan '03

Heyas ... Hope you aren't tired of me already .... I have a very strange problem, I think. Having become happy-happy with dovecot, I decided to install it on another machine that runs on an internal network and provides mailboxes for system monitoring. The setup is, or should be, quite straightforward. TLS is disabled, plaintext is not (I'll change this later, probably; this way is in theory easier to debug). Maildir; the MAIL environment variable is correctly set. Authentication via pam, for real users on the system, auth_user root. Pretty much as-distributed, except for disabling TLS. On attempted login, the client hangs. The following two messages appear in syslog: Jan 5 21:42:43 talifane imap-master: login: received another "not listening" notification Jan 5 21:43:43 talifane imap-login: Disconnected: Inactivity [127.0.0.1] Watching on lo via tcpdump, interesting things happen. If I login with the wrong password, the disconnect is quick (the message in syslog is different, just "Disconnected [127.0.0.1]" from imap-login). The server responds to the a0001 LOGIN command with a0001 NO Authentication failed. That's as expected. If I give the correct password, though, the server never responds. Note that the 'not listening' message appears sixty seconds before the disconnection for inactivity message. In tcpdump, it's clear that the client never gets anything that would give it reason to try another command. So ... have I managed to pull a total bimbo and misconfigure? Or is this a problem with the Alpha platform? I wanted to check before reporting a bug, but this is kinda strange, since it's about the simplest configuration that I can think of. Suggestions (for testing, or for fixing) would be welcome. Is there a way to start the daemon in a particularly verbose mode? In case it's useful, here's what the debian reportbug system generates for dependencies and stuff (0.99.5-1): -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable Architecture: alpha Kernel: Linux talifane 2.4.19 #1 Sat Aug 3 10:33:38 EDT 2002 alpha Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US Versions of packages dovecot depends on: ii libc6.1 2.3.1-9 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an ii libgcrypt1 1.1.10-2 LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr ii libgnutls5 0.6.0-2 GNU TLS library - runtime library ii libpam0g 0.76-9 Pluggable Authentication Modules l ii libtasn1-0 0.1.2-1 Manage ASN.1 structures (runtime) ii openssl 0.9.6g-10 Secure Socket Layer (SSL) binary a ii zlib1g 1:1.1.4-8 compression library - runtime It's specifically a PC164LX/533, 512MB RAM. Thanks for reading. Amy! -- Amelia A. Lewis amyzing {at} talsever.com You like the taste of danger, it shines like sugar on your lips, and you like to stand in the line of fire just to show you can shoot straight from your hip. There must be a 1000 things you would die for; I can hardly think of two. -- Emily Saliers

2 1

[dovecot] wierdness with mailboxes
by David E. Storey 06 Jan '03

06 Jan '03

Mail has always been the bane of my sys-admin life. I've been looking long and hard for a small, C-based, simple IMAP server that worked well with maildirs *and* mboxes and nothing else. wu-imap is so bloated and rife with decrepit, cross-platform, insecure code that I avoid it for any new servers. Courier-imap only supports maildirs but has some wierdnesses that I've come to live with. dovecot promises to be exactly what I'm looking for with just the right footprint and feature-set. =) I was surprised when I tried creating subfolders of mbox's. woohoo! The only problem is that dovecot manages to rename the parent, appending a '.'. So when we have: folder we now have: folder. folder.subfolder Evolution freaks out and thinks it can't store folders in 'folder.' and ends up with two subfolders: null and subfolder, which can contain messages. If I rename the parent folder without the trailing '.', everything works as expected. I'm trying to test some other imap clients now. d!

2 1

[dovecot] Some experiences
by Amelia A.Lewis 06 Jan '03

06 Jan '03

Heyas ... I'm trying to use dovecot to set up a 'closed server' (actually, mixed) sort of environment, for a box to be deployed co-located. I wanted to talk about some of that, and see if some of my experience qualifies as 'bug'. Note that I'm notoriously verbose, so if that bothers you, read no further .... Since it's a more-or-less closed server, I didn't want to use pam (well, I wouldn't mind, for users with shell accounts, but I can't see a way to mix pam and passwd-file ... is there a way to do that?). It turns out that digest-md5 support for clients is, well, not very widespread. I expect this box to be used by various windoze clients, eventually, and while I'm willing to lay down the law a little, I can't find enough digest-md5 support to lay down that law. So, regretfully, I abandoned that plan. This kinda bothers me, since I think TLS/STARTTLS is absolutely the *wrong* solution for mailbox access (or for anything that deals with a store-and-forward transport). I therefore tried md5 passwords in a passwd-file, with STARTTLS enabled. Didn't work. I turned off SSL, and reenabled plain-text, and watched the login go by. Very sniffable, of course. But correct username and password ... failed. There are instructions for creating digest-md5 style secrets in auth.txt, but none for md5 passwords; I used openssl passwd -1 [password] (and cut and paste). It seems odd to me that this didn't work; does that command use a different algorithm than dovecot? Falling back ... since it *shouldn't* matter if the passwords are weak, as long as they're inside TLS (along with the entire rest of the transaction, ugh), I used mkpasswd to generate a standard unix passwd (and cut and paste). This worked. It worked with TLS, and it worked without (as long as I remembered to allow sniffable logins). One more oddity: I originally had a realm in the passwd-file, which also established the mail location and 'home' directory (most of the users can't actually log in and don't have accounts in /etc/passwd, so it's not a real home directory). There was an odd message in syslog, approximately like so (where 'user' represents the username, and 'domain.realm' represents both my domain name and the realm in the passwd-file): imap(user:@omain.realm): Failed to create storage with data: domain.realm Note the missing first letter after user:@ And I don't know what it was trying to do; the maildirs already exist. /etc/dovecot.conf sets the default mail location to /home/users/%n/Maildir (non-shell users are all inside /home/users; shell users have mail there, with symlinks to ~/Maildir); the passwd-file establishes the location of the INBOX pretty definitively, I would think. The solution was to remove the realm (which isn't useful except for digest md5, anway, right?). Hey, it's working! Wahoo! *laugh* Anyway, if someone can offer suggestions on what's up with the pieces that *aren't* working, I'd be interested to know. It might give me a greater range of options. Amy! -- Amelia A. Lewis amyzing {at} talsever.com The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine. -- Indigo Girls

6 12

[dovecot] Util for pop3 to dovecot?
by Brad Figg 04 Jan '03

04 Jan '03

What I want to do is pop my email off of a Pop3 server and give it to dovecot for imap serving. Does anyone know of a utility that will allow me to do this? I looked at fetchmail but it seems to want to talk to an SMTP server. Thanks, Brad -- Brad Figg - brad(a)tpi.com 503.601.0235 ext. 105 TriplePoint, Inc. - http://www.tpi.com

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[dovecot] maildirmake, shared folders
by Amelia A.Lewis 03 Jan '03

03 Jan '03

Does dovecot support shared folders, maildir style? I've set it up, using the maildirmake from debian maildrop to create folders. I have a number of as-yet unresolved issues, so I haven't been able to test with many clients. It's interesting that dovecot manages to present folders as siblings (rather than children) of INBOX. But mutt, at least, doesn't seem to see the shared maildir (created per instructions in the maildirmake man page). I find in the debian archives that courier is unable to see messages delivered to new in a shared maildir. This doesn't seem to be the same set of symptoms, though. It appears, instead, that dovecot isn't recognizing (and then advertising) the shared-maildirs file (a text file that describes the name and the location). Is that the case? I don't think it's a high priority, mind, just wondering. Another question: can the dovecot distribution include a maildirmake utility? The documentation is pretty blunt about the significant advantages of maildirs, but one has to go to the courier distribution to find a utility to pre-create these (which dovecot seems to want, since it's recognizing the mail type by looking for the dir). This is most significant when setting up new users, of course. Possibly this is inappropriate, and I should instead ask the debian package maintainer to 'recommend' or 'suggest' the maildrop package in order to get the required utility. Nice stuff, though. I really like the ease of administration; dovecot looks to me like a sort of equivalent to postfix, for IMAP instead of SMTP. A request for the website: perhaps developers could supply information on clients used with the server, and what oddities are encountered? I know that IMAP client support is spotty, at best (for instance, I can't find a client that can do digest-md5; mutt is supposedly capable, but my installation doesn't even admit that that's a valid authenticator). This is partly significant because setting up a system that uses options for which there is little or no client support is, perhaps, an exercise in futility. Amy! -- Amelia A. Lewis amyzing {at} talsever.com Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise. -- The Duchess [Lewis Carroll]

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[dovecot] 0.99.5 released
by Timo Sirainen 02 Jan '03

02 Jan '03

v0.99.5 2003-01-02 Timo Sirainen <tss(a)iki.fi> * This release includes a lot of code cleanups, especially related to security. Direct buffer modifying was replaced in several places with a new buffer API, which provides a safe way to do it. Code that looks unsafe contains @UNSAFE tag to make auditing easier. + Support for SORT extension. Originally I thought about not implementing any extensions before 1.0, but too many people want webmails which want SORT. THREAD is another extension which they want, but we don't support it yet. + imap_listen and imaps_listen settings now accept "*" and "::" to specify if we want to listen in IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. "::" may also listen in all IPv4 addresses depending on the OS (Linux does, BSD doesn't) + New setting: default_mail_env can be used to specify where to find users mailbox. Default is still to use autodetection. + New setting: imap_log_path to log logins etc. informational messages to different file. + We support now separate mbox file for INBOX folder, no need for symlink kludging anymore. + Support for keeping index files in different location than actual mailboxes. ? Disabled mailbox_check_interval setting by default, it breaks Evolution. - SEARCH was still somewhat buggy, especially with laggy networks. Also body/header searches might have crashed or at least used memory too much - Deleting messages in the middle of mbox caused dovecot to reindex the following messages as new messages (ie. change UIDs and set \Recent flag). - Digest-MD5 auth: Initial server challenge packet was missing a comma, which might have made it incompatible with some implementations. - Some more fixes to unnecessarily high memory usage - SELECT and EXAMINE often printed UNSEEN reply or maybe complained about corrupted indexes. Happened usually only with mbox. - FETCH BODYSTRUCTURE gave incorrect reply, breaking pine - LIST was pretty buggy with mbox subfolders - CHECK command returned just "missing parameters" error - DELETE didn't work with mbox folders - CREATE mailbox<hierarchy separator> failed always. - CREATE and RENAME didn't create required hierarchies with mbox - RFC822 date parser didn't handle single digit days correctly. - login_process_per_connection = yes didn't work with imaps port connections which is exactly where it was mostly wanted. - ssl_disabled = yes didn't disable listening in imaps port - process limiting code didn't compile everywhere (eg. FreeBSD). - Linux sendfile() was never detected - We didn't work at all with gcc/PowerPC

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