Hi folks,
I am currently evaluating Dovecot for deployment to ~200 software engineers (so, heavy email users); I'm hoping this list could provide wisdom about how best to do the configuration, evaluation and deployment, and what testing folks have done to determine whether dovecot is right for their site. Below I've listed the diffs between the dovecot-example.conf and our config.
I've been playing with 1.0rc19 running on Solaris Nevada. We have set it up on our server on an alternate port from the existing IMAPd, which is something ancient, horrible and problematic. We're using sendmail and mail.local as our MTA and MDA, respectively, as these ship with the OS, and we need to test them.
I have some users who have volunteered to experiment with the server, and they are starting to do so. I've also seen the "flags" problems others have mentioned on the list, and I do not think I could deploy to production with that bug affecting the users.
I also have some issues which I'm not sure have been previously reported: One user (of my 4 test users) is occasionally seeing a bug in which mutt 1.4.2.1 claims to be "[downloading xxx/30724]" headers. Upon getting very near to the 30724 total, the total rises to something like: "[downloading xxx/50132]". And on and on. The actual number of messages in the box is 30724. This is not very reproducible, and we do not yet know if it's a problem with mutt or dovecot. Another, using Apple's Mail.App reported:
"Everything was working fine until i quit out of my mail app (Mac mail) and restarted. Then i saw weird things:
- messages wouldn't get marked unread
- messages from eons ago started showing up in my Drafts folder
- Inbox would keep spinning/loading
- then eventually Inbox just hung showing me no messages"Any thoughts about how to approach these issues? I don't really have a feel for how to go from user-observed-app-doing-X to imapd-is-doing-Y.
The big challenge for our site may be mailbox size: the median mailbox size is 62M, the average is 176M and the largest is 1.1GB. I'd be curious to know what sort of mailbox sizes other sites have experienced, and how widespread the use of the Dovecot MDA is-- is this likely to make a big difference for us, and will we have to migrate our (approximately 25) procmail users to sieve?
Having read the recent discussions about "1.0", I think my team would really appreciate knowing how to obtain something that was thoroughly vetted and worked highly reliably. If major changes are coming, I think it'd be great to have a 1.0.x stability focused tree, and a 1.1.x (or 2.x.x) feature tree.
Thanks in advance for your comments,
-dp[note that IMAPS is off for now, but that's just temporary]
$ diff dovecot.conf dovecot-example.conf 21d20 < protocols = imap 42,45d40 < protocol imap { < listen = *:150 < } < 50c45 < disable_plaintext_auth = no
#disable_plaintext_auth = yes 89c84 < ssl_disable = yes
#ssl_disable = no 214,215d208 < mail_location = mbox:~:INBOX=/var/mail/%u:INDEX=%h/Mail/imapd-indices < 258d250 < mail_extra_groups = mail 290d281 < dotlock_use_excl = yes 296d286 < lock_method = fcntl 441,444d430 < # dp: we'll see. < mbox_read_locks = dotlock fcntl < mbox_write_locks = dotlock fcntl <
-- Daniel Price - Solaris Kernel Engineering - dp@eng.sun.com - blogs.sun.com/dp