- dovecot - dovecot.org

Locking box for backups
by Steve Atkins 12 Nov '24

12 Nov '24

I’m running 2.3.19.1 on a system that isn’t set up to support filesystem snapshots. So I’d like to back up my mdbox mailboxes at a filesystem level (with rsync, or something equivalent). I’m assuming that to get a consistent backup I should lock the mailbox while I copy it. How should I acquire a (write) lock on an mdbox mailbox? Cheers, Steve

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auto clear trash
by Hua Young 12 Nov '24

12 Nov '24

Hello where can I setup dovecot to auto clear trash periodically? for example, I want the messages in trash folder to be kept up to 20 days. Thanks.

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replication and backup
by Philippe 12 Nov '24

12 Nov '24

Hi all & thanks Aki for adding me to the list. First of all, I'm not a dovecot user yet. For several years now I use cyrus imapd and never saw the urge to switch, until I recently lost random mails from my mailbox which were neither temporally connected nor related in some other way. Fortunately, I had a rolling replication which never expunges, so I was able to restore them. While circumventing some pitfalls during the restore, I learned that the backup and restore procedure cyrus imapd offers is deprecated and will be removed. Now I ponder whether or not I should switch the mda. Does dovecot offer the following? - setting up a rolling replication which replicates every action made to the mailbox (flags, mark as deleted, relocations, etc.) to a different server (one way only) - NOT expunging the emails that have been marked as deleted on the slave server or expunging only manually - restoring selected emails from the slave directly to the master The slave server doesn't need to be accessible via imap, I'd be happy to search for some header data (subject, recipient, sender, date, ...) and restore the email by command line using its uuid or message-id or something like that. Browsing the documentation I found "doveadm-backup" which is using "dsync", but I'm not sure whether or not it fits my requirements. I'd love to hear your opinions. Kind regards, Philippe

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SMTPUTF8 in dovecot lmtp - current status
by Kamil Jońca 12 Nov '24

12 Nov '24

About a year ago I asked about SMTPUTF8 in dovecot-lmtp, and then dovecod did not handle it. Is that changed? KJ -- http://wolnelektury.pl/wesprzyj/teraz/ A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours.

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Re: What is the appropriate action for out of memory error for exceeding vsz_limit in my situation?
by Adrian C. 10 Nov '24

10 Nov '24

On Fri, 8 Nov 2024, Marc wrote: > How much does it cost to upgrade to more memory? I have a server with 4G RAM is affordable. But if you do colocation and have to rent remote PoP hands to insert the RAM their hourly rate could be hundreds of dollars. If you're renting the entire server you have to ask your service provider for a quote to provision more RAM.

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Proper configuration of fts-xapian for dovecot
by Torge Riedel 10 Nov '24

10 Nov '24

Dears, I recently installed the package dovecot-fts-xapian on my Ubuntu 22.04 VM, where dovecot 2.3.16 is installed. I enabled the plugins mail_plugins = $mail_plugins fts fts_xapian plugin { ### # fts fts = xapian fts_xapian = partial=3 full=20 fts_autoindex = yes fts_enforced = yes #fts_autoindex_exclude = \Trash # Index attachements fts_decoder = decode2text } I skip to show the "service indexer-worker" and "decode2text" for the moment. After restarting dovecot I ran doveadm index -A \* which ran without any issues. But for the moment I am faced with two issues I am unable to solve on my own and also didn't found a solution on the internet: 1. The indexer created a new directory "xapian-indexes" in the user's mail folder (where also "INBOX", "Drafts", "Sent", ... exists), with the result that you can see this folder in Thunderbird and GMail Android App. How to hide / disable the folder to mail programs, IMHO no mail program should have access to it. 2. When listing the capabilities of my mail server I get "CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE IDLE SPECIAL-USE LITERAL+ AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=LOGIN" and it seems to lack the FTS capability(s). Am I right? And should dovecot set the capabality on its own or is something missing in the config? If you need more info, just let me know please. Thanks and kind regards Torge

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Re: Expunging and deleting old messages - moving from cyrus-imap
by Joseph Tam 08 Nov '24

08 Nov '24

> doveadm expunge -A MAILBOX * DELETED BEFORE 5d > > and got back: > > Fatal: Unknown argument BOOT > run-parts: /etc/cron.hourly/dovecot-cleanup exited with return code 75 Just a wild-ass guess, but did you escape the wildcard e.g. doveadm expunge -A MAILBOX \* DELETED BEFORE 5d Joseph Tam <jtam.home(a)gmail.com>

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What is the appropriate action for out of memory error for exceeding vsz_limit in my situation?
by Steve Dondley 08 Nov '24

08 Nov '24

Hi, I have sporadic messages on my server about an account getting an out of memory error: Fatal: master: service(imap): child 17910 returned error 83 (Out of memory (service imap { vsz_limit=325 MB }, you may need to increase it) - set CORE_OUTOFMEM=1 environment to get core dump) In response, I raised the limit from 256MB up to 325. That didn’t seem to help. The server has only 512 MB of RAM so I’m afraid to go much higher. I googled around a bit and some people are saying that when the dovecot.index.cache grows too large, it can cause these errors. The imap account has a dovecot.index.cache file that is 167 MB which seems to be well below the limit (but maybe it is compressed?). So I’m not entirely sure as to what the underlying problem is. So before upgrading to the server to 1024 MB of ram and going on a wild goose chase, I just want to get input on whether I have positively identified the problem and whether there might be something else I can do to manage this problem.

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Expunging and deleting old messages - moving from cyrus-imap
by Nick Howitt 07 Nov '24

07 Nov '24

I have just moved from cyrus-imap to dovecot. In cyrus I had an automatic purge of messages marked as deleted with a cron job: /usr/lib/cyrus-imapd/cyr_expire -E 1 -X 7 -D 7 -E = Expire Days -X = Expunge days What is the equivalent in doveadm? doveadm expunge -A DELETED BEFORE 1w Is there any equivalent to expire messages marked as deleted? I can't remember why I have it as I set up Cyrus so long ago. I also delete from deleted (INBOX.trash) anything older than a year. In Cyrus, it is run from an event in the configuration: trashPurge cmd="ipurge -s -X -f -d 365 user/*/Trash" at=0104 I would be happy to run it from cron, so does this work: doveadm expunge -A mailbox INBOX.trash SENTBEFORE 52w Except I get: doveadm(nobody): Error: mkdir(/nonexistent/.Maildir) failed: Permission denied (euid=65534(nobody) egid=65534(nogroup)) I can run it for the individual users but not -A. Nick

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Re: Expunging and deleting old messages - moving from cyrus-imap
by Joseph Tam 07 Nov '24

07 Nov '24

> What is the equivalent in doveadm? > > doveadm expunge -A DELETED BEFORE 1w > > Is there any equivalent to expire messages marked as deleted? I can't > remember why I have it as I set up Cyrus so long ago. If by expire, you mean expunge, this is more or less what I used in a nightly cron script doveadm expunge -A $ mailbox 'Deleted Items' OR mailbox 'Deleted Messages*' OR mailbox Junk OR mailbox Trash OR \( mailbox INBOX Deleted $ \) BEFORE 7d In English, for all users, delete any messages in commonly named trash folders or any messages in INBOX marked as deleted that are older than a week. I recall one quirk: if the mailbox didn't have a cached entry for the message's age, the filter criteria would miss this and it would remain in the mailbox. I'm not sure if this still happens, but I got around this by seeding the cache by doing a doveadm search for that metadata (date.received?). Joseph Tam <jtam.home(a)gmail.com>

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