On 5/10/2013 4:02 PM, Charles Marcus wrote:
On 2013-05-09 5:23 PM, Stephan Bosch stephan@rename-it.nl wrote:
First of all, it provides a convenient way to add SMTP AUTH support to any MTA.
Just to make sure I understand this correctly, basically, this means that if someone needs to provide SASL *client* capability on a postfix+dovecot system - ie, so that postfix can relay certain emails to certain destinations through an alternate relay server that requires SASL based SMTP AUTH - they would no longer need cyrus-sasl to accomplish this?
Ehhh.. no :) It implements the server-side SMTP AUTH, so that your MTA doesn't have to any more. So the client will authenticate to Dovecot rather than to the regular MTA/MSA. But, again, this is a rather trivial matter and not the main reason for building this proxy.
The LEMONADE profile is rather elaborate and not many clients or servers support it yet. I'm hoping that by providing a chicken, more eggs will follow soon.
I like that dovecot is willing to take a chance on being first to support these kinds of enhanced services, but I will say, it is very important that any support for said enhancements be rock-solid.
What do you mean exactly?
To provide some sort of solution for the short term, I guess I'll just add an optional auto-save-to-sent feature.
Sounds great to me, but...
In my opinion, because of the ubiquitous nature of MUAs saving messages to a sent folder, having a reliable and low-impact method for automatically filtering/removing/deleting these duplicates out should be a requirement before this feature is considered ready. It will be a big and immediate problem for any installation that chooses to enable this feature, as virtually all MUAs will be configured to save sent messages to a/the sent folder. It will also be an ongoing problem for all installations (existing and new alike), as users add their accounts to new computers, phones, tablets and other devices/MUAs, totally ignoring the instructions from their providers that they no longer need to enable this feature.
Yes, I agree.
In fact... after thinking about this some more, I wonder...
Would there be some reasonably reliable way to detect when an MUA is uploading/saving messages to the Sent folder,
Hmm, not sure. Do MUAs normally generate the Message-ID header, or is that created by the server? That could be one way to detect the duplicates in the Sent folder.
and if so, could the LEMONADE protocol be leveraged to create/send a 'notification' email to that user based on some kind of system template (hard coded? customizable?), informing them that there is no need to do this, and even including a link to a dovecot wiki page explaining how to disable the 'Save copy to Sent folder' feature in common MUAs?
Then it would be up to individual SysAdmins to keep the wiki updated with sections for any clients they become aware of that aren't already on the page.
Maybe future enhancements could even (try to) detect the MUA client (is this possible to do reliably?), and a direct link to the section of the wiki for that specific client could be provided?
Relying on user action doesn't sound like a very appealing solution to me. :)
Another thing that I know that google is really good at is automatically filtering (I guess they're deleting?) any and all duplicate emails. I have noticed this when copying a message store from one IMAP server to a gmail account. I had cases where the number of messages in certain folders wasn't the same, and upon investigation, noticed that the original/source in fact had some duplicate messages in certain folders.
That is entirely possible.
So, maybe you could 'kill two birds with one stone' so to speak. and whatever is done to address the duplicate Sent messages could also be leveraged to address duplicate messages in general? Although I guess it is not the same problem, so maybe not...
You mean something like this?
http://hg.rename-it.nl/dovecot-2.2-pigeonhole/raw-file/tip/doc/rfc/spec-bosc...
When the submission service has direct access to the user's mail storage, that is trivial to implement. However, if the submission service is unprivileged, that will be a little more difficult.
Are you talking about the difference between dovecot accessing mails with one system user, vs accessing mails with the individual users userID?
No, I'd like to be able to run SMTP submission without any direct filesystem access privileges, with e.g. one submission process handing submissions for many clients/users at the same time. For accessing the URLAUTHs there is already a support service in current Dovecot. Something similar could be devised for storing messages to Sent folders in that case.
Regards,
Stephan.