On Jan 10, 2008 9:03 AM, Scott Silva ssilva@sgvwater.com wrote:
on 1/9/2008 3:02 PM Andrew Falanga spake the following:
On Jan 9, 2008 3:24 PM, Pascal Volk < user+dovecot@localhost.localdomain.org> wrote:
Am 09.01.2008 22:51 schrieb Asheesh Laroia:
As they say, I have been schooled. (-:
My apologies - I wasn't aware of these "virtual user with a UID" setups. I was only aware of the "virtual users all share a UID" setup like the thread starter described. What should I say? The Dovecot wiki http://wiki.dovecot.org/ is very informative. :-)
Very informative yes, but at the same time it seems to make the same mistake all people make when writing documentation. There are many assumptions made that a lot of fundamental knowledge of how mail works is known to the reader. For example, the term "mbox" is simply used. It's not really described anywhere (admittedly, that I could find) what mbox is. It took much looking, and in fact one respondent to my question, a week ago, about what mbox and MAILDIR were, didn't respond with a dovecot wiki page but instead a wikipedia page. This really shouldn't be. This is only meant as constructive criticism, I'm not trying to be condemning here.
Andy
Anybody setting up something like a mailserver should HAVE the basic knowledge of these things. If you don't know the basics of how e-mail works, you should have someone else set up your system. It is too easy to mis-configure a mail server and have an open relay or a botted system.
There were times I came pretty close to asking for that type of help. Coming into this, I knew of sendmails (or postfix's) role in the mail process, and I knew that POP and IMAP daemons were used by mail clients to actually retrieve mail from the server from a mail client. What I wasn't clear on was how the mail actually ended up into a persons "INBOX." This process was unknown to me. It was educational to me that it was sendmail that handles this. (I must admit, it should have been obvious to me.)
If the dovecot wiki isn't going to explain these things entirely, because it's not dovecot's responsibility to do so, that's fine. Shouldn't the wiki explain, however, that, "Knowledge of what mbox, INBOX, MAILDIR, etc., is assumed. If you don't understand these terms, see (some links)?"
In an ideal world, perhaps, no one would setup a mail server unless they knew how to. The trouble is, this position doesn't take into account that we *DON'T* live in an ideal world. In our world, to know how to do something means you've got to set it up. But to set it up, you've got to be familiar with it, but to be familiar with it, you've got to set it up.
Andy
-- A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is it such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?