Chuck McManis wrote:
On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 8:44 AM, William Blunn <bill+dovecot@blunn.org<bill%2Bdovecot@blunn.org>
wrote:
Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Wed, 2010-06-16 at 08:28 -0700, Chuck McManis wrote:
Jun 16 08:22:07 eeebox dovecot: pop3(cmcmanis): Error: user cmcmanis: Initialization failed: Initializing mail storage from mail_location setting failed: mbox: mbox root directory can't be a file: /home/cmcmanis/Mailbox ( http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailLocation/Mbox)
..
Now it strikes me that this message indicates that Dovecot is confused about how mail is delivered on my system and is looking for a Maildir implementation when I"m using single files.
No, it's looking for a directory containing mbox files. See the wiki URL and "Only /var/mail/ mboxes" section in it.
One wonders if Chuck's stated requirement may be reasonably served by something like this:
mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=~/Mailbox
and create a directory "mail" in each user's home directory.
This should then make Dovecot consider each user's INBOX to be an mbox-format file at "~/Mailbox", and also allows Dovecot to keep indexes in the directory "~/mail", thereby enabling Chuck's users to take advantage of Dovecot's indexing functionality.
Fascinating, that gets it further, it creates a bunch of stuff in mail/.imap (which is confusing because I really really don't want IMAP and have removed IMAP from the protocols served and the ports listened on etc) Then it complains that it can't do an fcntl on Mailbox. It said 'operation not supported.'
Strange. Perhaps there is a problem locking the mbox file using fcntl. Though I would be surprised if this were the case on a modern filesystem on a modern unix-like OS.
If you can't use fcntl then you may be limited to using dotlocks (see http://wiki.dovecot.org/MboxLocking), though you would also need to determine with certainty that your MTA was using a compatible locking strategy --- don't skip this step unless you want to be spending 105% of your time firefighting weekly trouble reports of users complaining that their mailboxes are scrambled.
Though, if getting reliable locking on mbox is proving expensive, you might find your overall cheapest solution is to switch to Maildir. With mbox you have to be careful and work hard to make sure your various software components cooperate on mailbox locking and even silly things like mbox format variants (does it escape "From" or not?), and it is almost impossible to be certain that both the MTA and POP3 system are going to cooperate perfectly and not scramble mailboxes occasionally. With Maildir, everything works out-of-the-box with no configuration without breaking a sweat; mailbox corruption is simply designed-out.
Bill