Curtis Maloney sent this message on 4/9/2008 5:54 AM:

Phan Thanh Diện wrote:

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Hi,

We would like to switch from courier-imap to dovecot. I have installed dovecot on a machine running FreeBSD 6.3 and now testing it. My questions are below:

1. Can I configure dovecot to delete all files that are older, say 10 days, from defined mail boxes (for example Trash or Spam).

Yes - take a look at the "expire" plugin: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins

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2. After I access mail box (using web mail squirrel imap) all emails moved from 'new' directory to 'cur'. Then messages are not accessible for pop3. Such behavor doesn't occur with courier-imap. Can I force dovecot to behave like courier-imap?

That shouldn't be. If you're using Dovecot for both POP3 and IMAP, your mail client will be able to see all the mail no matter which protocol you access it with.

However, your mail client may be ignoring mail that's been "Seen".
I'm not sure why courier would behave differently with this.

Have you read the migration guide? http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/Courier

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Many thanks for help. Dien Phan

-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net

Hello,

Thank you for your email. We have been using XMail (www.xmailserver.org) for smtp and pop3, courier-imap for imap. This works for many years and we don't want to change. The only change we would like is to switch from courier-imap to dovecot. So configuration must be unchange: xmail for pop3 and smtp, dovecot for imap. Unfortunately we are facing the problem I wrote about: after a user access mail box via web client (www.squirrel.org) he can not see emails any more via pop3. The reason is emails moved from 'new' to 'cur' although nothing done. Dovecot automatically moves. Currently with courier-imap, no matter we access via web mail or imap client (such as ThunderBird or Outlook) users can retrive emails via pop3. So my question is: does courier-imap behave abnormally or my dovecot mis-configured?

Dien Phan

Curtis Maloney sent this message on 4/9/2008 9:37 AM:

Phan Thanh Diện wrote:

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Hello,

Thank you for your email.

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Unfortunately we are facing the problem I wrote about: after a user access mail box via web client (www.squirrel.org) he can not see emails any more via pop3. The reason is emails moved from 'new' to 'cur' although nothing done. Dovecot automatically moves.

Dovecot moves it because it is supposed to. Messages in "new/" are messages that the client has not "Seen" yet. Once they've seen them, the Maildir specs dictate the messages be moved to cur/.

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Currently with courier-imap, no matter we access via web mail or imap client (such as ThunderBird or Outlook) users can retrive emails via pop3. So my question is: does courier-imap behave abnormally or my dovecot mis-configured?

I couldn't say much about how courier works, having not used it. I know Timo and many others have investigated its behaviour, though.

I vaguely recall some Dovecot config option about how Seen is handled... have you checked through the config file?

-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net

I understand that seen messages must be moved to 'cur' folder. My question is: when web mail client lists messages in front page, none of them selected yet, do they become SEEN or not? The second question: if I disable pop3 with XMail and use dovecot for pop3 service, can I see emails in 'cur' folder via pop3 connection?

Thank you,

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I understand that seen messages must be moved to 'cur' folder. My question is: when web mail client lists messages in front page, none of them selected yet, do they become SEEN or not? The second question: if I disable pop3 with XMail and use dovecot for pop3 service, can I see emails in 'cur' folder via pop3 connection?

Thank you,

I am an ex-courier user now moved to dovecot.

As far as I can see Courier and dovecot behave near identically here.
The only difference is that dovecot id files have very slightly different names to the courier ones - I don't know xmail, but it sounds broken here because with maildir it should check both new and cur dirs for mail? Certainly Courier (by default) also moves mail from new to cur when you access a folder (which is correct behaviour)

Dovecot has an option NOT to do this though (I think?) - something in the POP section I believe - I think it's under the not updating indexes for pop users section?

I see no reason not to just switch pop and imap to dovecot though. Just read the migration section to understand about migrating UIDs over so that POP users don't download the whole folder again if they are used to "leaving email on the server". You can have multiple users access a single mailbox via POP + IMAP all without problems if you use dovecot

I found the simplest migration strategy was to use the "proxy" feature.
Setup the proxy to forward users to either the old server or the new server itself. Then point all users to the proxy and now you can switch them to either the new server or the old server one by one! Now migrate across mailboxes one by one and adjust the proxy flag so that the user then goes to the new server. The proxy is a complete passthrough so users will get all the bugs and warts of the xmail server if their mailbox is still on that (and imap will get passed back to the courier server). You can do the migration a few users at a time then without disrupting things too much if you find a problem. I found I needed to set the capabilities flag option on Dovecot to "lie" and claim it only supported the subset of features used on Courier because some imap clients ask for the caps before they auth (which is sensible), hence end up using dovecot caps but on the courier server. (easily worked around though)

Additionally I setup all my machines using vservers now - makes this kind of change a complete doddle - just copy the vserver somewhere and fiddle with it, blow it away when you are finished...

Good luck

Ed W

On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 09:38 -0500, Bob Gustafson wrote:

dovecot: IMAP(bobgus): Corrupted index cache

file /home/bobgus/Maildir/.INBOX.Cron-normal/dovecot.index.cache: invalid record size: 8 Time(s) dovecot: IMAP(bobgus): Corrupted index cache file /home/bobgus/Maildir/dovecot.index.cache: invalid record size: 3 Time(s)

I suppose this is with ext3 filesystem? I can't really think of how these can still happen with post-v1.0 releases. I haven't managed to cause them for a long time now.

In any case they should be invisible to users (as long as Dovecot actually catches the corruption instead of returning corrupted data to clients).

dovecot: IMAP(bobgus): Effective uid=504, gid=504,

home=/home/bobgus: 119 Time(s) dovecot: IMAP(bobgus): maildir: root exists (/home/bobgus/Maildir): 119 Time(s) dovecot: IMAP(bobgus): maildir: root=/home/bobgus/Maildir, index=/home/bobgus/Maildir, control=, inbox=: 119 Time(s)

As for these, turn off mail_debug :)