On Mon, May 07, 2012 at 10:53:53AM +1000, George Barnett wrote:

We're using dovecot to provide pop3 for a number of mailboxes. The setup is pretty simple:

I would suggest trying to educate your users to move off of POP3.

Each user / domain has a mailstore in /data/mailstore/<domain>/<user>/Maildir (backed by NFS).

Passwords are in simple passwd-file format in the top level domain directory eg:

# cat /data/mailstore/foo.com/.passwd user:{plain}password

The passdb setup looks like this.

passdb { args = username_format=%n /data/mailstore/%d/.passwd driver = passwd-file }

The problem we're having is that when we want to remove a domain from the system and we go to rm -rf /data/mailstore/<domain>/ we are unable to because the auth process is still holding onto the file handles for the password file.

Can somebody suggest an alternative pattern that I could use for storing password files? Ideally, we'd avoid one large file to prevent locking issues and would also keep the passwd-file setup since it's simple.

SQLite. Learn a bit of SQL, which is not difficult, and it is not hard to manage. My own little howto, including the schema and a complete explanation of everything is here:

http://rob0.nodns4.us/howto/

It would be possible to have the password files in a separate dir, but over time I'm guessing that would lead to nfs turds? Easy to clean up I suppose, but maybe there's a simpler solution I'm missing?

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