- dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] Newbie: dovecot not running.
by Simon Waters 23 Aug '04

23 Aug '04

Okay, sure it must be trivial.... I have old Redhat box, want a quick and dirty IMAP server, thought good time to try out dovecot (I'd rather it had Debian on too ;). Downloaded and compiled from source - no options to configure. Auth data is in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow (as well as NIS). vi /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf as expected. Disable ssl in conf. Basically email is in mbox format in /var/spool/mail/%u Should go somewhere ~%u/mail is fine, as would be ~%u/Mail (I don't care at the moment). created a user "dovecot..." to run as and edited conf file. If I run /usr/local/sbin/dovecot it terminates without errors, the fork is completing I think, and the main program returns as expect. Running imap-auth from xinetd gets me a greeting banner, but then the connection is closed. Trying to run "imap" directly just dies in a blizarrd of "dot locking" errors and the like, where it seems to ignore the locking directives (should I set an env or some such?), but I think that it is basically running (it creates indexes in ~/mail/...mumble) but complains about the dotlocking, and then spews an internal error (which it claims is logged to server log?). I'm off to try auth_verbose, but any tips or hints appreciated. I'm assuming /usr/local/sbin/dovecot is what was called "master" given it is in the master src directory. Simon

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[Dovecot] 1.0-test33
by Timo Sirainen 23 Aug '04

23 Aug '04

http://dovecot.org/test/ I think I found and fixed the last bug that was giving me problems. Now that Dovecot has been successfully working for a few hours, time for a new test release :) This release has major changes, so there might still be some bugs left. Be careful. If you're upgrading from previous 1.0-test release, you must delete all existing dovecot.index.log files or you will get errors. So, the changes are: - All network sockets are nonblocking now and all the waiting is done in a single event loop. This required tons of changes all over the code. - Transaction log file doesn't use locks for reading anymore - Some mbox fixes - search text was broken

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[Dovecot] MIME structure intermittently lost
by Kenneth Porter 23 Aug '04

23 Aug '04

I'm using Dovecot-0.99.10.5-0.FC2 on Fedora Core 2 on the server, and Mulberry 3.1.6 over Win2kSP4 on the client. Intermittently messages with multiple parts show up as a single text part. I'm not sure if it's Mulberry or Dovecot. I just turned on IMAP logging and restarted Mulberry and a message with two text/plain parts that wasn't showing the 2nd part is now displaying it correctly. I hate heisenbugs!

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RE: [Dovecot] Unusual behaviour
by Mark Lidstone 23 Aug '04

23 Aug '04

Ahh! Now you've explained it, it makes a lot of sense. Many thanks, Mark Lidstone IT and Network Support Administrator BMT SeaTech Ltd Grove House, Meridians Cross, 7 Ocean Way Ocean Village, Southampton. SO14 3TJ. UK Tel: +44 (0)23 8063 5122 Fax: +44 (0)23 8063 5144 E-Mail: mailto:mark.lidstone@bmtseatech.co.uk Website: www.bmtseatech.co.uk ======================================================================== == Confidentiality Notice and Disclaimer: The contents of this e-mail and any attachments are intended only for the use of the e-mail addressee(s) shown. If you are not that person, or one of those persons, you are not allowed to take any action based upon it or to copy it, forward, distribute or disclose the contents of it and you should please delete it from your system. BMT SeaTech Limited does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the context of this e-mail or its attachments which arise as a result of Internet transmission, nor accept liability for statements which are those of the author and not clearly made on behalf of BMT SeaTech Limited. ======================================================================== == -----Original Message----- From: Timo Sirainen [mailto:tss@iki.fi] Sent: 23 August 2004 09:07 To: Mark Lidstone Cc: dovecot(a)dovecot.org Subject: RE: [Dovecot] Unusual behaviour On Mon, 2004-08-23 at 08:48 +0100, Mark Lidstone wrote: > Is it supposed to give the current time and date in the error message. > I've no problem with it giving an "internal error" message to the > client, but I am a little confused about the time being in there. > That's all I'm asking about. Client should never see any "real" error messages to make sure no extra information about the system gets leaked. So any time something unexpected happens, Dovecot gives the "internal error" message to user while writing the real error to log file. The timestamp is there to help sysadmin find the real error message from log files when user gives a copy&pasted internal error message. Instead of timestamp I guess there could be also some unique identifier which could be grepped from logs but I think timestamp is better. And about the original problem of giving "internal error" when Dovecot process didn't have access to some maildir.. Maybe it could have replied "Permission denied" to client in that case. It already does in several cases, but I guess the problem here was that it was trying to create the missing dirs but couldn't. I'll look over all these permission issues properly when creating real shared folder support.

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RE: [Dovecot] Unusual behaviour
by Mark Lidstone 23 Aug '04

23 Aug '04

OK, last try. Is it supposed to give the current time and date in the error message. I've no problem with it giving an "internal error" message to the client, but I am a little confused about the time being in there. That's all I'm asking about. Mark Lidstone IT and Network Support Administrator BMT SeaTech Ltd Grove House, Meridians Cross, 7 Ocean Way Ocean Village, Southampton. SO14 3TJ. UK Tel: +44 (0)23 8063 5122 Fax: +44 (0)23 8063 5144 E-Mail: mailto:mark.lidstone@bmtseatech.co.uk Website: www.bmtseatech.co.uk ======================================================================== == Confidentiality Notice and Disclaimer: The contents of this e-mail and any attachments are intended only for the use of the e-mail addressee(s) shown. If you are not that person, or one of those persons, you are not allowed to take any action based upon it or to copy it, forward, distribute or disclose the contents of it and you should please delete it from your system. BMT SeaTech Limited does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the context of this e-mail or its attachments which arise as a result of Internet transmission, nor accept liability for statements which are those of the author and not clearly made on behalf of BMT SeaTech Limited. ======================================================================== == -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Boothman [mailto:andrew@mux.org.uk] Sent: 20 August 2004 18:09 To: Dovecot list Subject: Re: [Dovecot] Unusual behaviour Mark Lidstone wrote: > I thought that Dovecot was supposed to handle that kind of thing? > Reading from the website: > > "Any kind of crash is considered as bug and will be fixed - even if > it happens only by deliberately poking the index files." > > I've done it in the past by just creating the bare folders - they > appear in the IMAP folder list then when they're used Dovecot seems to > create the sub folders anyway. > > The issue I'm asking about here is, should the error message say > "Internal Error [date time]" rather than something useful? Did Dovecot actually crash? Did it log a more sensible error message to syslog? I think Dovecot quite often reports an "internal error" to the client but then writes a more sensible error message to syslog. Which is probably no bad thing as you may well not want clients to see detailed error messages - there's nothing they can do about it anyway. Andrew

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[Dovecot] Multiple dovecot processes stepping on each other
by Peter Hessler 23 Aug '04

23 Aug '04

I have two instances of dovecot running, one for v6 and one for v4 connections. The only differences in the config files are: --- /etc/dovecot-ip6.conf Wed Aug 18 11:15:43 2004 +++ /etc/dovecot-ip4.conf Wed Aug 18 11:09:17 2004 @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ # *** NOTE *** Some values HAVE been changed for OpenBSD use. # Base directory where to store runtime data. -base_dir = /var/dovecot-v6/ +base_dir = /var/dovecot-v4/ # Protocols we want to be serving: # imap imaps pop3 pop3s @@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ # "host:port", although with multiple protocols you probably want to move # this setting inside protocol imap/pop3 { ... } section, so you can # specify different ports for IMAP/POP3. -listen = [::] +listen = * # IP or host address where to listen in for SSL connections. Defaults # to above if not specified. For the most part it is working, but every so often, the auth freaks out for one (random) account. The error for one example is below: Aug 18 11:13:12 gir dovecot: login: Authentication process 21082 doesn't exist Aug 18 11:13:12 gir dovecot: pop3-login: Internal login failure: phessler [208.201.244.164] This happens on both v4 and v6 connections, but infrequently. If you try again immediatly, it works. If I do a `ps -p 21082` I can see the process (dovecot-auth). This does not happen when I have only one dovecot process running. What is the best way to have multiple dovecot processes without them stepping on each others toes? This is on OpenBSD/macppc -current, running dovecot-1.0-test32. -- Mosher's Law of Software Engineering: Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job.

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[Dovecot] Dovecot stop accepting command When reading disk quota (soft)
by Chan Min Wai 23 Aug '04

23 Aug '04

Hello all, I've face some problem here and I think it should be the way. 1) I'm running Dovecot version 0.99.10.4 (fc1 release) on RH9 2) One of the users have reach the soft disk quota limits 3) Dovecot stop the users from deleting email. What I think was, dovecot should let the user continue to use the services until it reach the hard limits, but pop up message each and every time ;). Anyone have that problem before? Thank You Chan Min Wai

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[Dovecot] Sent, Drafts, Trash folders
by Jason M. Wilde 23 Aug '04

23 Aug '04

I am hosting imap mail for a new affiliate and am offering webmail via squirrelmail as well. Squirrelmail created INBOX.Sent, INBOX.Trash, etc by default and I would like to use these folders for my Dovecot imap users. I am using the mbox format, Postfix and users retrieve mail via the Outlook client remotely in addition to webmail access. Thank you for any help. Jason

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[Dovecot] What about saving your INBOX at ~/mbox ?
by Nico Kadel-Garcia 23 Aug '04

23 Aug '04

Hi, folks. I'm testing out RedHat's "Fedora Core 2" release, which has switched from the old WashU imapd to dovecot-0.99.10. Overall, this looks like a really, really good move on their part: it looks like a very sweet little tool without some of the ingrained idiocy of Mark Crispin insisting that every home directory consist of nothing but mbox files and allowing you to use a configurable subdirectory by default, ~/mail. Cool. There is one feature of the old WashU imapd that I miss, though. That daemonn could be configured to automatically transfer the user's email to the "~/mbox" upon activation of the daemon, effectively reducing the size of the /var/spool/mail/{username}" mail spool and helping keep the user's disk usage in their home directories, not in /var/spool/mail. This can be a good thing for various reasons. But I don't see any way to enable that behavior for dovecot. Is there something I'm missing, or do folks feel it would be reasonable to add? -- Nico Kadel-Garcia Systems Engineer Mitsubish Electric Research Lab <nkadel(a)merl.com>

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[Dovecot] Is 1.0-test stabilising?
by Curtis Maloney 23 Aug '04

23 Aug '04

Has Timo backed off work, and been busy with something else, or has 1.0 really stabilised that much? Seems to me just a couple of weeks ago we were seeing a new test release every few days... now there's been nothing all month... I'm hoping it's ready for release... but if it's just that Timo's busy, well, I can understand that. We're about to receive some new servers, and I hope to migrate from 0.99 to 1.0 as we migrate to the new machines. -- Curtis Maloney

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