First of all, I think dovecot is really fantastic and I have thanks for all the hard work. I think it will be the best fit for my ~5000 users when I have it setup completely. We normally have approx 500 concurrent IMAP connections during the day.
I am trying to convert from courier-imap to dovecot, but I have an issue with public namespace folders that are not writable by certain users. Please let me know if I need to provide more information or how I can help solve this issue.
In courier-imap, we were able to take advantage of the maildir structure and standard unix users/groups to allow 'decsstaff' members to have full write access while 'decsall' members only have r/o unless also a member of 'decsstaff':
-rw-rw-r-- 1 postlocal decsstaff 37597 May 5 23:37 /egr/mail/shared/decs/.support.In/cur/1178422658.M533373P54269.ice drwxrwxr-x 2 postlocal decsstaff 24576 May 5 23:37 /egr/mail/shared/decs/.support.In/cur drwxrws--- 6 postlocal decsall 4096 Apr 22 18:08 /egr/mail/shared/decs/.support.In drwxrwsr-x 34 postlocal wheel 4096 May 1 07:23 /egr/mail/shared/decs
In short, upper directories are used to limit world access to just one group 'decsall', and once inside, r/o world access could be used as an anonymous substitution for 'decsall' and the group permissions would allow writing by 'decsstaff'. I don't know how courier stores and checks mail directory permissions, but it was aware when a user would not be able to delete or change messages and would return a READ-ONLY imap error when an attempt to change a message occurred (courier returns this in the IMAP response to update mail flags to reflect that the client wants to move to delete a mail). I understand that imap clients will usually only set status as read or deleted first and only try to delete an email for real on expunge, but it seems dovecot does not try to detect if a message is modifyable before it is too late for the user to find out. What happens is a user appears to be able to mark messages read, move them to another folder, or delete them (another way of moving to another folder eg. Trash). The user is clueless that the changes will not occur, and only finds out later when they reload the folder to find the messages back, or tries to expunge and get an unhelpful 'internal error' from dovecot (I can help trace this situation if it helps, but I think that stage should not be reached if things were working right). My configuration has the public folder control and indexes inside a user's home directory, so it will always be possible for dovecot to record message status changes, however I do not think dovecot should update the control and indexes to reflect an IMAP operation that is not allowed to complete due to restricted permissions on the actual email file. I suppose dovecot would have to check the permissions on mail message files.
As a workaround, I wondered if I could apply dovecot ACLs to the public folders to reinforce my intentions of only allowing readonly access to certain users. If ACLs worked, I could even use it as a viable alternative to the unix permissions on the maildir contents and avoid using more unix groups than necessary. For most of our shared mailboxes, there will only be a few persons with write access, and up to a dozen people with read access, so even if I have to list every user seperately I could. However, I have not been able to get ACLs to do anything useful for me, and I hesitate to use the feature to work around might be a configuration error or bug. It is also more convenient for my migration procedure if I do not have to modify file permissions or structure during downtime to switch to dovecot. I am still not sure how dovecot ACLs affect the actual permissons of dovecot processes. I have mostly tried placing a dovecot-acl file in the maildir directory (alongside cur, tmp, new) and dovecot seems to be reading it according to the log, however I am not getting expected results from the ACLs. If the unix permissions allow a client to enter 'cur' and read mails, the mail client thinks it can delete or move them (until expunge) no matter even if I put acl entries with only 'r' permission.
ACL questions (which might help others understand better as well): Is a 'user=foo rl' entry supposed to remove any possible write permissions in a maildir covered by such an ACL for user foo? If not, shouldn't it at least enforce restrictions on the available mail metadata which is more likely to be writable by the user?
Is it even possible for an ACL to grant additional permissions above what is granted to a user by standard unix permissions?
Does an empty ACL equate to the exact permissions granted by unix, and should an admin try to design an ACL to modify as little as possible, or should the admin try to use enough acl entries to form a complete description of the desired resulting permissions? I get the impression that broad ACLs should be listed first, and more specific ACLS listed below can add or remove ACL permissions applied earlier in the file as a 'last match' case.
Should the acl plugin be able to print a summary of the resulting permissions in the log (with mail_debug=yes) when accessing a folder with an ACL?
A snip from logs, I generated alot today and I'm not sure which portions would be most useful so I'll start with this: May 6 15:20:08 gribble dovecot: IMAP(mcdouga9): acl: initializing backend with data: vfile:/usr/local/etc/dovecot-acls May 6 15:20:08 gribble dovecot: IMAP(mcdouga9): acl: acl username = mcdouga9 May 6 15:20:08 gribble dovecot: IMAP(mcdouga9): acl: owner username = May 6 15:20:08 gribble dovecot: IMAP(mcdouga9): acl vfile: Global ACL directory: /usr/local/etc/dovecot-acls May 6 15:20:08 gribble dovecot: IMAP(mcdouga9): Namespace: type=public, prefix=#shared/decs/, sep=/, inbox=no, hidden=no, subscriptions=no May 6 15:20:08 gribble dovecot: IMAP(mcdouga9): maildir: data=/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/decs:CONTROL=/home/mcdouga9/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/decs:INDEX=/home/mcdouga9/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/decs May 6 15:20:08 gribble dovecot: IMAP(mcdouga9): maildir: root=/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/decs, index=/home/mcdouga9/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/decs, control=/home/mcdouga9/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/decs, inbox= May 6 15:20:08 gribble dovecot: IMAP(mcdouga9): opendir(/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/decs/tmp) failed: Permission denied
# dovecot --version 1.0.0
The reason I have so many public spaces below, is to match the existing directory structure we setup for courier, and also to help us keep the directory listing more tidy since otherwise we would end up with many folders all under one directory. Some of them have monthly rotation and it could get out of hand if we did not split them up. I understand it makes things more difficult for the global acl list at present, if I were to use it, but I may not have any conflicting folder names at this time.
# dovecot -n # /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf ssl_cert_file: /usr/local/etc/apache2/ssl/mail.egr.msu.edu.pem ssl_key_file: /usr/local/etc/apache2/ssl/mail.egr.msu.edu.pem login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login login_executable: /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login verbose_proctitle: yes first_valid_uid: 1000 first_valid_gid: 0 mail_location: maildir:~/Maildir:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/private/control:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/private/indexes mail_debug: yes mmap_disable: yes maildir_copy_with_hardlinks: yes mail_plugins: acl mail_log_max_lines_per_sec: 0 imap_client_workarounds: delay-newmail outlook-idle netscape-eoh tb-extra-mailbox-sep namespace: type: public separator: / prefix: #shared/be/ location: maildir:/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/be:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/be:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/be namespace: type: public separator: / prefix: #shared/cee/ location: maildir:/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/cee:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/cee:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/cee namespace: type: public separator: / prefix: #shared/chems/ location: maildir:/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/chems:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/chems:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/chems namespace: type: public separator: / prefix: #shared/decs/ location: maildir:/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/decs:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/decs:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/decs namespace: type: public separator: / prefix: #shared/egr/ location: maildir:/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/egr:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/egr:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/egr namespace: type: public separator: / prefix: #shared/me/ location: maildir:/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/me:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/me:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/me namespace: type: public separator: / prefix: #shared/org/ location: maildir:/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/org:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/org:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/org namespace: type: public separator: / prefix: #shared/toptest/ location: maildir:/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/toptest:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/toptest:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/toptest namespace: type: public separator: / prefix: #shared/ugs/ location: maildir:/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/ugs:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/ugs:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/ugs namespace: type: public separator: / prefix: #shared/vprgs/ location: maildir:/egr/mail/shared-dovecot2/vprgs:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/control/vprgs:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/public/indexes/vprgs namespace: type: private separator: / prefix: mail/ hidden: yes namespace: type: private separator: / location: maildir:~/Maildir:CONTROL=%h/Maildir/dovecot/private/control:INDEX=%h/Maildir/dovecot/private/indexes inbox: yes auth default: mechanisms: plain login passdb: driver: pam userdb: driver: passwd socket: type: listen client: path: /var/spool/postfix/private/auth user: postfix group: postfix master: plugin: acl: vfile:/usr/local/etc/dovecot-acls
Thanks.