Background: I'm new to dovecot (although with many years Washington IMAP behind me). We're considering migrating from Washington IMAP to dovecot on the main service here, and have just started trying dovecot, using RC7.
Washington, IMAP has the usual(-ish) "/var/spool/mail" shared area for the INBOX (trad. UNIX "From " format); a user's folders default to being in their home directory (same format). We are looking towards a "minimal effort" migration to dovecot, so wish to keep this layout. (In an ideal world, we would re-think, including "maildir" etc. But that's not an option at the moment.)
I have encountered three issues (so far); I'm not sure whether their mine or something in dovecot (if the latter, whether bugs or features; whether RC7-specific issues; etc.).
- The overall description of "default_mail_env" seems inadequate (in the conf file, "doc/variables.txt" and "doc/mail-storages.txt"). I'm trying: default_mail_env = mbox:~:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%-2.02i/%u:INDEX=/tmp/indexes/%d/%n
and that seems OK-ish. (The extra "%-2.02i" is because we subdivide the otherwise huge "/var/spool/mail/" directory using the user's uid-mod-100.) But the mere act of an IMAP "login" commands creates a directory (empty) with the liternal name of ~ (tilde). (An IMAP 'list "Mail" "*"' command successfully finds the usr folders in the 'Mail' subdirectory of the user's home directory.)
It's almost as if the 'default_mail_env' is telling it to create (literal) '~' before realising that this is shorthand (as in C-shell) for home directory.
- We have some Pine usage in our UNIX cluster. Historically this has taken advantage of the Pine "rsh mailmachine /etc/rimapd" ability to avoid the need for the password: pre-authentication etc. (Yes, we realise that 'rsh' has security issues.) But when I try making symlink "/etc/rimapd" point to "/usr/dovecot/sbin/dovecot" this fails: Error: Can't use SSL key file /etc/ssl/private/dovecot.pem: Permission denied
We have: /etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem (mode 444) /etc/ssl/private/dovecot.pem (mode 400) for the sake of secure-IMAP (port 993). But why does this come into the equation at all for this (none-SSL) "rsh ... /etc/rimapd" usage?
- I was developing and testing this here at work using an account that I mostly use from home using Outlook Express. I was very careful (I think!) only to use the read-only "examine INBOX" command (not "select INBOX"). When I went home and tried it as usual (connecting to our production Washington IMAP service reading that INBOX). But OE showed all the email (including previously read) as "unread" (closed envelope icon). It seems that dovecot has done something to the message headers (even under "examine") that has worried OE. Any thoughts?
Finally any hints for NFS-based working? We have a farm of a few Fedora machines running the IMAP processes and the sendmail locally-delivery. Our current "/etc/fstab" NFS spec. for the INBOX area (on a NetApp) is: rw,noac,actimeo=0,vers=3,tcp,timeo=600,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,hard,intr,fg,nosuid
Any changes? Issues? Thinks to consider? Etc.
Many thanks.
--
: David Lee I.T. Service : : Senior Systems Programmer Computer Centre : : Durham University : : http://www.dur.ac.uk/t.d.lee/ South Road : : Durham DH1 3LE : : Phone: +44 191 334 2752 U.K. :