[Dovecot] Dovecot Local Delivery Agent
Hi
I noticed in a post that Timo might start work on a LDA Great! If so, here is something I would really like included.
Support for PAM
There is quite a lengthy reason behind this. In my organisation, user accounts are created on ldap. It is up to the services to create home directories whenever the user first uses them. For instance, Samba will do this the first time they connect to their windows home share. This achieved in other places using pam, using the pam_mkhomedir module.
The MTA we run, Exim, is incapable of creating the home directory automatically, or using PAM for local delivery, thus we have the problem that when an account is created in the LDAP directory, it cannot receive email until the user first logs in through IMAP - Dovecot calls pam, which creates the home directory :-) Also attributing to this is the fact that exim is configured to deliver email into $home using maildir format rather than a mbox mail spool. We needed to do this because of the huge size of some of the inboxes of our users. This caused a severe amount of i/o blocking.
So far, I have been unable to find a LDA capable of doing this.
Since we migrated to dovecot, performance has improved ten-fold. I will give it a week then show you the graphs to prove it!
Keep up the great work!
Regards
-- Chris Hills IT Services North East Worcestershire College
On 218, 08 05, 2004 at 12:08:49PM +0100, news.gmane.org wrote:
Hi
I noticed in a post that Timo might start work on a LDA Great! If so, here is something I would really like included.
Where is this post ? I want to read it too :))
Support for PAM
Yeah, let's create long wishlist :)
- Quota support, especially on maildir storage;
- Sieve support. I can possibly help with this, as I already have homebrew Sieve enabled MDA using libsieve from GNU mailutils. It works, but only maildir is ssupported and it's a little kludgy.
Best regards.
-- Andrey Panin | Linux and UNIX system administrator pazke@donpac.ru | PGP key: wwwkeys.pgp.net
On 6.8.2004, at 15:12, Andrey Panin wrote:
I noticed in a post that Timo might start work on a LDA Great! If so, here is something I would really like included.
Where is this post ? I want to read it too :))
I don't think it said much..
Yeah, let's create long wishlist :)
- Quota support, especially on maildir storage;
It would use mail-storage API so if Dovecot internally supports quota then LDA would too.
- Sieve support. I can possibly help with this, as I already have homebrew Sieve enabled MDA using libsieve from GNU mailutils. It works, but only maildir is ssupported and it's a little kludgy.
I would rather not create my own fully featured LDA. Making someone else's LDA just use Dovecot's mail_save() and dovecot-auth would be better. Doing the actual mail saving should be simple, but I'm not exactly sure how the initialization would work. It would need to figure out where and how mails are stored (dovecot-auth's master socket would tell), and also read namespace settings from dovecot.conf.
- Sieve support. I can possibly help with this, as I already have homebrew Sieve enabled MDA using libsieve from GNU mailutils. It works, but only maildir is ssupported and it's a little kludgy.
I would rather not create my own fully featured LDA. Making someone else's LDA just use Dovecot's mail_save() and dovecot-auth would be better.
I support this concept :-)
(I have an LDA whose scripting language includes an embedded SIEVE syntax, and I do plan to make it dovecot-friendly once I get up some more steam for another round of working on it. See www.mvmf.org if you are curious; apologies if it's rude to mention it here again.)
Doing the actual mail saving should be simple, but I'm not exactly sure how the initialization would work. It would need to figure out where and how mails are stored (dovecot-auth's master socket would tell), and also read namespace settings from dovecot.conf.
Or at least derive their information in compatible ways.
mm
On 7.8.2004, at 01:21, Mark E. Mallett wrote:
(I have an LDA whose scripting language includes an embedded SIEVE syntax, and I do plan to make it dovecot-friendly once I get up some more steam for another round of working on it. See www.mvmf.org if you are curious; apologies if it's rude to mention it here again.)
I liked it's features last I looked, but it was also non-open source at least then. Are you going to change it sometimes soon?
On Sat, Aug 07, 2004 at 04:41:42AM +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On 7.8.2004, at 01:21, Mark E. Mallett wrote:
(I have an LDA whose scripting language includes an embedded SIEVE syntax, and I do plan to make it dovecot-friendly once I get up some more steam for another round of working on it. See www.mvmf.org if you are curious; apologies if it's rude to mention it here again.)
I liked it's features last I looked, but it was also non-open source at least then. Are you going to change it sometimes soon?
That's probably just a result of my poor communications skills. I did include very brief LICENSE and FUTURE files with the sources, and those files probably led you to that conclusion. For clarification, I do intend that the program be open source, but I feel that there are some things that I should still finish up myself before foisting it off on any potential contributers. It's not a matter of "I don't want you to have it" -- it's more a matter of "I don't feel right burdening you with filling in holes just yet" (for the generic "you"). (That makes it sound like it's not usable: it's quite usable right now. There are just features still left to add.)
Plus, as with many other packages and maintainers, I just want to control any official version.
mm
On 5.8.2004, at 14:08, news.gmane.org wrote:
Support for PAM
I'm not sure how exactly this would work. LDA doesn't use any passwords, so it would have to make a PAM call with some dummy password. And that would create a two second delay with most PAM implementations.
There is quite a lengthy reason behind this. In my organisation, user accounts are created on ldap. It is up to the services to create home directories whenever the user first uses them. For instance, Samba will do this the first time they connect to their windows home share. This achieved in other places using pam, using the pam_mkhomedir module.
I think a better idea would be to just make the LDA create the home directory.
Timo Sirainen wrote:
On 5.8.2004, at 14:08, news.gmane.org wrote:
Support for PAM
I'm not sure how exactly this would work. LDA doesn't use any passwords, so it would have to make a PAM call with some dummy password. And that would create a two second delay with most PAM implementations.
Maybe I am all wrong here (you are all so clever on this list), but isn't PAM divided into 4 different areas exactly for the purpose of using only some of them?
Password comparison is done in pam_auth (usually, but can be replaced with OTP or other authentication schemes).
In Debian at least, you can add a module to the pam_session loop to mount something. Such mounting module is simply ignored if included in auth, account or password loops (as I understand it).
As I understand Chris he requests support for the _relevant_ PAM loops, and you, Timo, say that the auth loop is irrelevant.
- Jonas
--
Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
- Enden er nær: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
On 8.8.2004, at 13:57, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
Support for PAM
I'm not sure how exactly this would work. LDA doesn't use any passwords, so it would have to make a PAM call with some dummy password. And that would create a two second delay with most PAM implementations.
Maybe I am all wrong here (you are all so clever on this list), but isn't PAM divided into 4 different areas exactly for the purpose of using only some of them?
Oh, right, I didn't think of it that way. I haven't done much with PAM myself.
Anyway, I'm still hoping someone else to do the LDA so I don't have to worry about it.
Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi writes:
Anyway, I'm still hoping someone else to do the LDA so I don't have to worry about it.
Maildrop should be easy to bore up. No, I'm not doing it :*)
-- Matthias Andree
NOTE YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE MY MAIL IF YOU'RE USING SPF! Encrypted mail welcome: my GnuPG key ID is 0x052E7D95 (PGP/MIME preferred)
news.gmane.org wrote:
Since we migrated to dovecot, performance has improved ten-fold. I will give it a week then show you the graphs to prove it!
As promised:-
http://itservices.ne-worcs.ac.uk/images/dovecot-load.png
The daily spikes are due to tape backups.
Regards
-- Chris Hills IT Services North East Worcestershire College
participants (6)
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Andrey Panin
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Jonas Smedegaard
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Mark E. Mallett
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Matthias Andree
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news.gmane.org
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Timo Sirainen