On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, John Peacock wrote:
[...] I think the real problem is that you are using two LDA's (Local Delivery Agent) which both assume they are the exclusive LDA. Dovecot's 'deliver' expects to be handed an e-mail directly from the MTA (Message Transfer Agent) directly, not via some other program.
Thanks for the reply.
In what follows "From_" (with an underscore) refers to the "From " (with a space) traditionally seen in email transcations, especially in MBOX.
There are a few different things going on, which inter-relate:
Suppose the MTA itself generates a "From_" which then feeds into 'deliver'. Shouldn't 'deliver' detect this? Furthermore, shouldn't it actually use this preferentially? My own particular use is merely exposing what already seems to be poor, indeed (I would suggest) a bug.
The "From_" generated by 'deliver' is poor. It should be followed by a real email address, representing the originator of the email (possibly the other side of the world). Instead it inserts the fixed string, not even an email address: "dovecot.deliver". This seems to be a double bug: not an email address, nor representative of _sender_. Again, my own particular use is, I think, merely exposing an underlying flaw.
If you are using procmail, you should use procmail exclusively to process the local delivery. If you want to use 'deliver' with server-side rules, you should use the Dovecot SIEVE 'deliver'.
Perhaps. That takes us back to the very opening scene-setting of this thread. Reminder:
Very busy mail service (20,000 users, small farm on Linux email servers accessing NetApp storage via NFS).
Well-established UW-IMAP service. Because of the vital importance of locking (to ensure integrity) this has always carefully ensured that the only software which ever touches the mailbox is the UW-IMAP suite: imapd/pop3d for MUAs; tmail (from sendmail) for simple delivery; dmail (via user .procmailrc recipies) for user-guided delivery. So because simultaneous writes from the IMAP daemon (e.g. message deletion) and from delivery processes use the same UW-IMAP software suite, the locking should be (and seems to be over many years) consistent.
In other words: very cautious and conservative about what touches the mailboxes.
My fundamental question about migrating to dovecot. Following the above model, I feel I ought to use only "deliver" (not mixed with "mail.local", nor "procmail" nor anything else) to touch the mailboxes. With dovecot, is it known to be safe to relax this caution and conservatism (without worry!) and allow other software (along with dovecot imap) to dabble with the mailboxes?
(Even if mixed-supplier software is proven safe, so that I could use "mail.local" and direct "procmail" delivery, I still think dovecot 'deliver' could be improved as suggested earlier.)
Any thoughts?
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