Chris Wakelin wrote:
Saurabh Barve wrote:
Hi,
I am running dovecot 0.99-14 on a Fedora Core 2 machine. I had a few questions:
- I wanted to upgrade to the dovecot-1.0 release. However, I am not sure if that's really required. dovecot-0.99-14 has been running very well for me for quite some time. Is there a real advantage to switching to the latest release. The reason I'm asking this is because: i) I don't have too many users to server - around 15 only.
We've got 15,000 or so (mind you, it's a big server!). We're thinking of migrating from UW-IMAP to Dovecot 1.0-stable.
ii) My mail server is a pretty fast machine (~1 GHz, 1 GB RAM) machine, so hardware isn't too much of an issue. iii) I like to install software from rpm's. It's not that I can't install from source, but installing from rpm's makes it much easier for me. Just a personal preference. The version of dovecot that I am running was obtained from Dag Wieers web site. I haven't seen a newer version there. I've googled for rpm's for newer versions, and they are available, but I don't want to install it from some third party source that I don't know/trust.
Me too, at least in Linux (but we're using Solaris). However, if there isn't one, I tend to "roll my own". You get the benifits of package management and you can always share them with others!
iv) I am also planning to support web mail for my users (probably through Squirrelmail). Are there any advantages/disadvantages to upgrading dovecot for that?
Probably not? Squirrelmail and other PHP-based webmail clients will make lots of connections, so you'll be relying on Dovecot's indexes to prevent the server getting clobbered.
v) People use Mozilla Mail, Mail.app, Thunderbird, Outlook, and Opera. Does the 1.0 version provide better integration with different mail clients (even though I understand that
sometimes it's a problem with the client implementation).There have been a few fixes in 1.0, but if your users are happy with 0.99, it might be better to stick with that.
So, are there newer version of dovecot (1.0-stable) available in rpm formats which are guaranteed to be safe and un-trojaned? And is there any really good reason why I should upgrade to 1.0-stable?
For me, it was support for hidden IMAP namespaces (which can be used to hide the migration from UW-IMAP) that decided it. Also it's more likely to get patches. But "if it's not broken, don't fix it!"
- My second question is about creating the .subscriptions (or subscriptions in 1.0) file. When I moved people over from using pine to using a mail client like Evolution/Thunderbird, I had to create .subscriptions/.mailboxlist file for them so that they could see the folders that they had created in pine. However, people still sometimes access e-mail using pine. They then create new folders in pine, which they are unable to see in their mail client. Is there a way around it? This occurs especially when people check their mail at the start of the month, and pine asks about saving/deleting old sent-mail folders, Trash folders. Is there a way to add these folders automagically to the .subscriptions file?
Not without modifying the source code to replace ".subscriptions" with ".mailboxlist". You could have problems with UW-IMAP (and presumably Pine) including the folder prefix for the folders in the file, which Dovecot doesn't.
Alternatively, an overnight reconciliation script might do?
- Would I be able to support web mail using mailboxes in mbox format, as I have them now? Or do I have to go for Maildir format? Since our university introduced web mail, they have had two sets of folders - one with capitalization (Sent, Deleted Messages, etc.) and one without (sent-mail, etc. - these were from our pine days). Is this due to web mail?
Mboxes should be fine (at least in 1.0). The important consideration is how long it takes to open a folder, as most webmail clients don't use persistent connections to the server.
The two sets of folders is just down to using differently-configured clients (including webmail). We have the same problem. I sometimes wish they'd defined "OUTBOX" as a special folder in the IMAP protocol as they did "INBOX"!
Also, if I do need to convert from mbox to Maildir, what is the standard tool for doing that? I saw at least three different tools/scripts for doing that (mbox2maildir,mb2d,mb2md-2,mb2md.pl, .. ). Which tool (and from where) should I use to convert mailboxes without problems?
I don't know, but would be interested in finding out!
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Saurabh.
sa@atmos.colostate.edu
Best Wishes, Chris
Thanks for the quick comments, Chris. I hope the dovecot-1.0 shows up as an rpm soon on the apt/yum repos, so that I can upgrade painlessly. The one mail client I've had real problems with is Thunderbird. It doesn't like to read the folders inside ~/mail for some reason. Apparently, there were quite a few posts on the list in the last couple of months suggesting that T'bird implementation might be broken. Mozilla Mail, though seems to work without a hitch.
I had another question that I missed in my last post. I was supporting Secure-IMAP using dovecot for some time. However, the self-signed certificate expires in one month. I understand that there are security-issues in letting the certificate last indefinitely. Is there a way around this? Or do I just keep regenerating the certificate every month?
Thanks again, Saurabh.
sa@atmos.colostate.edu