Re: [Dovecot] Running a dovecot IMAPS server
On Sun 16 Sep 2007, Jos Vos wrote:
Just to be clear what I am saying. Suppose you have a standard maildir setup on computer X, with directories ~/Maildir/inbox/[cur,new,tmp]/ , ~/Maildir/family/[cur,new,tmp]/ , etc.
Suppose now you start dovecot IMAP on computer X. Then you will not be able to see the family folder on computer Y, running as an IMAP client, ie with an IMAP kmail account pointing to computer X.
If I am right, you have to re-organise and re-name the folders on X if you want to see them on Y. And if you do this, you can no longer seem them on X with kmail.
Dovecot has both mbox and Maildir format support.
I find the statement that dovecot has maildir format support misleading.
By maildir support, I mean that mail is contained in directories ~/Maildir/inbox/[cur,new,tmp], ~/Maildir/Family/[cur.new.tmp], ~/Maildir/Finance/[cur,new,tmp], etc.
This is the setup created if one runs kmail as mail client, specifying that one is using maildir format, and using the GUI to create new folders Family, Finance, etc.
As far as I can see, if you now set up an IMAP server using dovecot on this machine, setting mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir/ in /etc/dovecot.conf then the email in the folders Family, Finance, etc will not be seen by an IMAP client.
But as soon as you have an e-mail klant using a non-supported mailbox format *or* that is storing mail folders in a supported format but in a non-standard place, tour theory applies, yes.
What is the "standard" place for mail folders?
See also http://wiki.dovecot.org/ for more info about this all.
I've studied that wiki, and not found clear information on this point.
To clarify my question, suppose one has email organised in server X as described above, in directories ~/Maildir/Family/[cur.new.tmp/ , etc. And now suppose one wants to access this email from laptop Y. How exactly does one have to change the setup on machine X? And what does one set mail_location to?
It seems to me that this is an issue likely to be faced by anyone wanting to run a small home network. reading email on various machines, and wanting this email to be kept "in sync".
Maybe dovecot is not a suitable program for this purpose?
On Sun, 2007-09-16 at 13:03 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Dovecot has both mbox and Maildir format support.
I find the statement that dovecot has maildir format support misleading.
By maildir support, I mean that mail is contained in directories ~/Maildir/inbox/[cur,new,tmp], ~/Maildir/Family/[cur.new.tmp], ~/Maildir/Finance/[cur,new,tmp], etc.
That's one way to implement multiple mailboxes to Maildir format, but there's no such standard.
As far as I can see, if you now set up an IMAP server using dovecot on this machine, setting mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir/ in /etc/dovecot.conf then the email in the folders Family, Finance, etc will not be seen by an IMAP client.
With v1.1 you can do this with:
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:LAYOUT=fs
To clarify my question, suppose one has email organised in server X as described above, in directories ~/Maildir/Family/[cur.new.tmp/ , etc. And now suppose one wants to access this email from laptop Y. How exactly does one have to change the setup on machine X? And what does one set mail_location to?
Why do you want it to work like that? Can't you just use the Maildir++ layout and use the email only via IMAP?
It seems to me that this is an issue likely to be faced by anyone wanting to run a small home network. reading email on various machines, and wanting this email to be kept "in sync".
If you use only IMAP, there should be no problem.
Timo Sirainen wrote:
Dovecot has both mbox and Maildir format support.
I find the statement that dovecot has maildir format support misleading.
By maildir support, I mean that mail is contained in directories ~/Maildir/inbox/[cur,new,tmp], ~/Maildir/Family/[cur.new.tmp], ~/Maildir/Finance/[cur,new,tmp], etc.
That's one way to implement multiple mailboxes to Maildir format, but there's no such standard.
First of all, thank you for responding, and (more importantly) for dovecot.
I wasn't suggesting that the maildir format I described was "standard", just that it is the one you will get if you set up an email system using kmail in the usual way.
It could therefore be described as a "normal" maildir format; and if dovecot does not like this format, I think this should be explained clearly in the dovecot documentation. [I didn't find the Maildir vs Maildir++ account very illuminating.]
As far as I can see, if you now set up an IMAP server using dovecot on this machine, setting mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir/ in /etc/dovecot.conf then the email in the folders Family, Finance, etc will not be seen by an IMAP client.
With v1.1 you can do this with:
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:LAYOUT=fs
I'm not clear what this means. Dovecot-1.1 has not yet come to Fedora 7, which I use, but I would be more than happy to compile it, if you are saying that I could then stick with my present mail setup on my server?
To clarify my question, suppose one has email organised in server X as described above, in directories ~/Maildir/Family/[cur.new.tmp/ , etc. And now suppose one wants to access this email from laptop Y. How exactly does one have to change the setup on machine X? And what does one set mail_location to?
Why do you want it to work like that? Can't you just use the Maildir++ layout and use the email only via IMAP?
I would be quite happy to do this, but when I tried briefly re-naming ~/Maildir/Family/ to ~/Maildir/.Family/ on my server and re-started dovecot it did not seem to work - I did not see the Family folder on my client (using IMAPS).
I wonder if I could press you to say exactly how I should change the setup on the server, and also how I should define mail_location in dovecot.conf , and what I should set DEFAULT to in .procmailrc ? Or point me to some location where this is set out - I didn't find any explicit instructions like this in the dovecot wiki.
Timothy Murphy wrote:
It could therefore be described as a "normal" maildir format; and if dovecot does not like this format, I think this should be explained clearly in the dovecot documentation. [I didn't find the Maildir vs Maildir++ account very illuminating.]
I'm jumping in late to the game (sorry missed your original post somehow); my personal opinion here is that kmail is doing what I would call non-standard Maildir-ing, and it's causing you confusion with what most of us learn about Maildir in our travels.
From what I understand via the spec and all Timo's posts, the actual folder format is never laid down in stone and is open to each implementation. However the default/accepted Maildir format as used by all the big boys (courier, dovecot, exim, postfix, etc.) is:
~/Maildir/.Family/ ~/Maildir/.Friends/
The Maildir hierarchy that kmail is giving you is not the ad-hoc accepted norm; they chose to do away with the leading '.' character it appears (I don't use kmail). The dot-prefix format is what I call normal, kmail seems abnormal (in the big picture, but kmail is doing nothing wrong per spec!) From your above statement you believe it to be the reverse and that dovecot doesn't like the format -- it's not that, it's that dovecot was built to work out of the box with the accepted global norm which is a dot-prefix Maildir hierarchy.
With v1.1 you can do this with:
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:LAYOUT=fs
I'm not clear what this means.
I believe Timo means that in the latest code (1.1 is alpha status) he has added new features, and one of those features is to use the filesystem separator for folders. Since '/' is the standard on *nix, then your kmail format would magically be recognized and used without it's dot-prefix.
1.0 dot-prefix: ~/Maildir/.Family.Marge/ 1.1 LAYOUT=fs: ~/Maildir/Family/Marge/
Why do you want it to work like that? Can't you just use the Maildir++ layout and use the email only via IMAP?
I would be quite happy to do this, but when I tried briefly re-naming ~/Maildir/Family/ to ~/Maildir/.Family/ on my server and re-started dovecot it did not seem to work - I did not see the Family folder on my client (using IMAPS).
You went a little too fast. :) After renaming the folder to .Family, use your email client to subscribe to the folder; I don't use kmail but in Thunderbird you rightmouse click on Inbox and choose Subscribe from the popup menu. Technically this places the name of the subscribed folder in a file named 'subscriptions' in the ~/Maildir/ directory on the server. Dovecot only presents the folders listed in this subscriptions file to the client when the client asks for a list of folders.
IMAP allows folders present on the server which are not presented to the client when it logs in, hence the idea of subscribing. Unsubscribed folders are great for archiving old stuff that you don't really need to see but need to keep around. By not subscribing after you renamed the folder to include a dot it remained invisible to your client.
hth, -te
-- Troy Engel | Systems Engineer Fluid Inc. | http://www.fluid.com
On Sun, 2007-09-16 at 20:56 -0700, Troy Engel wrote:
IMAP allows folders present on the server which are not presented to the client when it logs in, hence the idea of subscribing. Unsubscribed folders are great for archiving old stuff that you don't really need to see but need to keep around. By not subscribing after you renamed the folder to include a dot it remained invisible to your client.
This is actually client-specific, some clients don't support subscriptions at all and others can be configured to use or not use them.
I've written a bit more about how I think they should be implemented in http://www.imapwiki.org/ClientImplementation/MailboxList -> Subscriptions.
Timo Sirainen wrote:
To clarify my question, suppose one has email organised in server X as described above, in directories ~/Maildir/Family/[cur.new.tmp/ , etc. And now suppose one wants to access this email from laptop Y. How exactly does one have to change the setup on machine X? And what does one set mail_location to?
Why do you want it to work like that? Can't you just use the Maildir++ layout and use the email only via IMAP?
It seems to me that this is an issue likely to be faced by anyone wanting to run a small home network. reading email on various machines, and wanting this email to be kept "in sync".
If you use only IMAP, there should be no problem.
Just a note to say I have everything working fine now. As suggested, I am basically using IMAP for everything.
Looking back, there were two problems.
Firstly, for some reason I kept getting a warning that the "resource .INBOX.directory" could not be found (this is not the exact message).
Secondly, it took an extraordinarily long time for the IMAPS directory on my laptop to appear. In fact, it only appeared (to my surprise) when I re-booted the laptop after several hours. I take it that this was somehow related to SSL or TSL authentication.
I found that I had to move my old ~/Maildir/Folder/cur/* messages "by hand" to the IMAP folder created by kmail at ~/Maildir/.Folder/new/ ; kmail did not allow me to move messages from a Local folder to an IMAP folder, although it saw both.
Incidentally, as far as I can see one has to keep a Local account on kmail, as well as an IMAP account, since eg sent mail goes to ~/Maildir/sent-mail/cur/ . I didn't find any kmail setting to change this. Also, I assume it is sensible to leave the trash folder on the local machine.
One tiny query; my .procmailrc has DEFAULT set to $HOME/Maildir/ ,which seems to work fine. Someone suggested it should be set to $HOME/Maildir/new/ ?
In any case, dovecot IMAPS is working perfectly now, as I said. Thank you very much for what seems an excellent program. I had previously tried to set up a Cyrus IMAP server, but for one reason or another this did not work (under Fedora 7).
On 9/20/2007, Timothy Murphy (tim@birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie) wrote:
Incidentally, as far as I can see one has to keep a Local account on kmail, as well as an IMAP account,
Dunno why it would be necessary. TBird doesn't have an easy way to lose the 'Local Folders' - maybe kmail has something similar that you are referring to? I just keep those collapsed and ignore them.
since eg sent mail goes to ~/Maildir/sent-mail/cur/ . I didn't find any kmail setting to change this.
???
'Special' folders are definable by the client - in TBird, I always use 'Sent', 'Drafts', 'Templates' and 'Trash' (these are the defaults too).
Also, I assume it is sensible to leave the trash folder on the local machine.
Sensible? No... but it is a personal preference...
I keep the Trash expiration (a TBird setting, not a server-side setting) separate from the defaults, set to delete messages older than 30 days - and I like having the trash on the IMAP server, but that is a personal preference.
I still think you are missing something about how IMAP works...
--
Best regards,
Charles
On Thu 20 Sep 2007, Charles Marcus wrote:
Incidentally, as far as I can see one has to keep a Local account on kmail, as well as an IMAP account,
Dunno why it would be necessary. TBird doesn't have an easy way to lose the 'Local Folders' - maybe kmail has something similar that you are referring to? I just keep those collapsed and ignore them.
There appear to be several default folders with kmail, namely inbox, outbox, sent-mail, wastebin, draughts, templates .
since eg sent mail goes to ~/Maildir/sent-mail/cur/ . I didn't find any kmail setting to change this.
??? 'Special' folders are definable by the client - in TBird, I always use 'Sent', 'Drafts', 'Templates' and 'Trash' (these are the defaults too).
Maybe kmail is different ...
I still think you are missing something about how IMAP works...
What exactly?
At 3:28 AM +0100 9/21/07, Timothy Murphy wrote:
On Thu 20 Sep 2007, Charles Marcus wrote:
Incidentally, as far as I can see one has to keep a Local account on kmail, as well as an IMAP account,
Dunno why it would be necessary. TBird doesn't have an easy way to lose the 'Local Folders' - maybe kmail has something similar that you are referring to? I just keep those collapsed and ignore them.
There appear to be several default folders with kmail, namely inbox, outbox, sent-mail, wastebin, draughts, templates .
Local folders are an issue entirely local to a mail client and irrelevant to any IMAP server.
since eg sent mail goes to ~/Maildir/sent-mail/cur/ . I didn't find any kmail setting to change this.
It's a very bad idea for a mail client running on the same host as an IMAP server to try to access the same mailstore via the filesystem. Maildir is a fuzzy standard: as defined it ignores a lot of things that users of the format want, so Maildir++ exists and various programs that work with Maildir mailstores have made their own mostly-harmless extensions to the original structure that are not standardized and may not interoperate.
??? 'Special' folders are definable by the client - in TBird, I always use 'Sent', 'Drafts', 'Templates' and 'Trash' (these are the defaults too).
Maybe kmail is different ...
Apparently.
In any case, clients (KMail, Eudora, ChatterEmail, Mulberry, Outlook, whatever) create any particular folders that they they want to use for particular purposes by telling the IMAP server to do so, and there is no well-defined standard for what 'special' folders exist on an IMAP server or how they are named or used.
I still think you are missing something about how IMAP works...
What exactly?
IMAP is not a file server protocol.
"What KMail does" is not a definition of any standard.
(Only based on your description) KMail does not seem to share much with common (albeit poorly standardized) IMAP client behavior.
A mailer shouldn't expect to be able to both work directly with a Maildir mailstore through the filesystem and with an IMAP server that is accessing the same mailstore.
Bill Cole bill@scconsult.com
On Fri 21 Sep 2007, Bill Cole wrote:
It's a very bad idea for a mail client running on the same host as an IMAP server to try to access the same mailstore via the filesystem.
I don't know what you mean by "the same mailstore". KMail on my laptop has a Local account, and an IMAPS account. The Local account, which I rarely use, accesses messages on the laptop (such as system messages). the IMAPS account accesses messages on the desktop. This seems to me to work perfectly.
I still think you are missing something about how IMAP works...
What exactly?
- IMAP is not a file server protocol.
I don't know what this means, so I certainly never assumed it.
- "What KMail does" is not a definition of any standard.
I never suggested it was. But I use kmail, so what kmail does is of interest to me.
I find KMail works perfectly with dovecot (I had some problems originally, because of the different directory structures.)
- (Only based on your description) KMail does not seem to share much with common (albeit poorly standardized) IMAP client behavior.
KMail works perfectly as an IMAPS client, in my experience.
A mailer shouldn't expect to be able to both work directly with a Maildir mailstore through the filesystem and with an IMAP server that is accessing the same mailstore.
I don't use KMail on my desktop, except as an experiment, but when I do there do not appear to be any problems. My Local folders are kept in directories ~/Mail/Folder1/[cur,new,tmp[/ and are not seen by IMAPS. My IMAPS folders are kept in directories ~/Maildir/.Folder2/[cur,new,tmp]/ and are not seen my kmail.
Timothy Murphy wrote:
I don't use KMail on my desktop, except as an experiment, but when I do there do not appear to be any problems. My Local folders are kept in directories ~/Mail/Folder1/[cur,new,tmp[/ and are not seen by IMAPS. My IMAPS folders are kept in directories ~/Maildir/.Folder2/[cur,new,tmp]/ and are not seen my kmail.
If Local folders are under ~/Mail/ - this is OK. But you were saying your local messages are under ~/Maildir/ - the same as dovecot-accessed. And this is wrong. This might be working fine, but still, this is wrong.
FiL
At 4:18 PM +0100 9/21/07, Timothy Murphy wrote:
On Fri 21 Sep 2007, Bill Cole wrote:
It's a very bad idea for a mail client running on the same host as an IMAP server to try to access the same mailstore via the filesystem.
I don't know what you mean by "the same mailstore". KMail on my laptop has a Local account, and an IMAPS account. The Local account, which I rarely use, accesses messages on the laptop (such as system messages). the IMAPS account accesses messages on the desktop. This seems to me to work perfectly.
I'm sorry, I clearly misunderstood your previous post.
Bill Cole bill@scconsult.com
On 9/21/2007, Bill Cole (dovecot-20061108@billmail.scconsult.com) wrote:
A mailer shouldn't expect to be able to both work directly with a Maildir mailstore through the filesystem and with an IMAP server that is accessing the same mailstore.
Absolutely... but one thing that I have wished for is 'maildir-like' support (ie, storing messages locally one file per message) in TBird for the local/cached messages/folder, so that I could delete a single email on the local side to force it to be redownloaded, rather than having to delete the entire mbox file, thus forcing TBird to have to redownload *all* email for that folder again (in some cases thousands of messages, and Gigabytes of data, if you are keeping local copies for 'off-line' access).
The word is it would take a major rewrite of TBird, so it isn't likely to be implemented soon.
Does KMail actually work this way? This would be enough to make me try it out... although my day to day WS is a windows box, so I'd most likely wait until KDE4 is available on Windows...
Although, honestly I like TBird so much that I cannot seriously believe I'd like KMail enough to permanently switch, even for this one major benefit.
--
Best regards,
Charles
Charles Marcus wrote:
Does KMail actually work this way? This would be enough to make me try it out... although my day to day WS is a windows box, so I'd most likely wait until KDE4 is available on Windows...
Offtopic to the left -- before I switched to using GMail for my personal mail, I used to use Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ ) and it stores messages in a MH format (a file-per-message design somewhat like Maildir) and it can import mbox files from Thunderbird. The client itself is very nice too, I remember really liking it a lot.
Bonus: Win32 binaries are also available.
hth, -te
-- Troy Engel | Systems Engineer Fluid Inc. | http://www.fluid.com
Does KMail actually work this way? This would be enough to make me try it out... although my day to day WS is a windows box, so I'd most likely wait until KDE4 is available on Windows...
Offtopic to the left -- before I switched to using GMail for my personal mail, I used to use Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ ) and it stores messages in a MH format (a file-per-message design somewhat like Maildir) and it can import mbox files from Thunderbird. The client itself is very nice too, I remember really liking it a lot.
Bonus: Win32 binaries are also available.
I tried it a long time ago, but it was still really buggy on Windows...
I do remember that its interface didn't seem to be nearly as polished (being that it was GTK based).
But, like I said - with TBirds extensions capability, I really don't see myself moving away. There are only two big things baout it I don't like:
No proper 'Signature Manager' (yes, I've seen and used the Signature extensions (Signature, Signature Switch, etc), but they still require you to manually create the sigs first. This is a *glaring* lack in my opinion...
Monolithic message storage... this is still a biggie to me, but I can live with it...
--
Best regards,
Charles
Charles Marcus wrote:
No proper 'Signature Manager' (yes, I've seen and used the Signature extensions (Signature, Signature Switch, etc), but they still require you to manually create the sigs first. This is a *glaring* lack in my opinion...
Monolithic message storage... this is still a biggie to me, but I can live with it...
I know this is totally unrelated to this topic, but... Is there any extension to create and use templates? I don't like "<full name> wrote:" in my reply messages and would prefer some custom templates, that would be different for different accounts. Thanks,
FiL
On 9/21/2007, FiL @ Kpoxa (FiL@kpoxa.org) wrote:
I know this is totally unrelated to this topic, but... Is there any extension to create and use templates?
? Just 'Save as' > Template...
I don't like "<full name> wrote:" in my reply messages and would prefer some custom templates, that would be different for different accounts.
Oh... maybe you meant 'custom quote line' instead of 'template'?
Quickquote can do this to an extent (not to mention its killer, couldn't-live-without-it feature, 'Quote only selected text')...
--
Best regards,
Charles
Charles Marcus wrote: based on the account I'm using (I have 4 accounts configured in TB)
On 9/21/2007, FiL @ Kpoxa (FiL@kpoxa.org) wrote:
I know this is totally unrelated to this topic, but... Is there any extension to create and use templates?
? Just 'Save as' > Template... Save as Template just save a message, but it doesn't allow you to use variables, use different templates, based on the action (reply, forward, new) and so on.
I don't like "<full name> wrote:" in my reply messages and would prefer some custom templates, that would be different for different accounts.
Oh... maybe you meant 'custom quote line' instead of 'template'?
Quickquote can do this to an extent (not to mention its killer, couldn't-live-without-it feature, 'Quote only selected text')... I want something, that would allow me to do this -
- different custom quote lines and different rules of using either full quote or just the latest message in the thread,
I want custom quote line, that would have date and time of the message am replying to. Something like "On %DATE% %SENDER% wrote:"
I want cursor positioned AFTER quoted message automatically.
Most of the FIDO mailers back in 1990 had this functionality. I've seen some kind of Outlook Express add-on, that had something like that. But there is nothing current and nothing that works with TB.
Well, anyway, thank you for trying to help.
FiL
FiL @ Kpoxa spake the following on 9/24/2007 2:36 PM:
Charles Marcus wrote: based on the account I'm using (I have 4 accounts configured in TB)
On 9/21/2007, FiL @ Kpoxa (FiL@kpoxa.org) wrote:
I know this is totally unrelated to this topic, but... Is there any extension to create and use templates?
? Just 'Save as' > Template... Save as Template just save a message, but it doesn't allow you to use variables, use different templates, based on the action (reply, forward, new) and so on.
I don't like "<full name> wrote:" in my reply messages and would prefer some custom templates, that would be different for different accounts.
Oh... maybe you meant 'custom quote line' instead of 'template'?
Quickquote can do this to an extent (not to mention its killer, couldn't-live-without-it feature, 'Quote only selected text')... I want something, that would allow me to do this -
- different custom quote lines and different rules of using either full quote or just the latest message in the thread,
- I want custom quote line, that would have date and time of the message am replying to. Something like "On %DATE% %SENDER% wrote:"
This is configruable in Thunderbird but you must edit configs directly.
http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/tips
- I want cursor positioned AFTER quoted message automatically.
Most of the FIDO mailers back in 1990 had this functionality. I've seen some kind of Outlook Express add-on, that had something like that. But there is nothing current and nothing that works with TB.
Thunderbird will also position after the quotes. Set it in account settings
Well, anyway, thank you for trying to help.
FiL
--
MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!!
On 9/24/2007, Scott Silva (ssilva@sgvwater.com) wrote:
I want something, that would allow me to do this - based on the account I'm using (I have 4 accounts configured in TB)
- different custom quote lines and different rules of using either full quote or just the latest message in the thread,
- I want custom quote line, that would have date and time of the message am replying to. Something like "On %DATE% %SENDER% wrote:"
This is configruable in Thunderbird but you must edit configs directly.
This would only get him #2, I don't see any way to get #1 - custom quote headers that are different for each account, much less be able to include quoted text for all messages in a thread (in TBird, replies are specific to one message only).
As I said before Quickquote will get him partly the way there...
--
Best regards,
Charles
FiL @ Kpoxa wrote:
I know this is totally unrelated to this topic, but... Is there any extension to create and use templates? I don't like "<full name> wrote:" in my reply messages and would prefer some custom templates, that would be different for different accounts.
This might not be exactly what you need but then again it might be - I use an extension named Clippings:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/1347
When you're in the compose window, rightclick on an empty space in the text editing area and choose Clippings. I have templates for all sorts of things (new hire welcome message with company info, for instance) that save me a lot of time.
-te
-- Troy Engel | Systems Engineer Fluid, Inc | http://www.fluid.com
participants (8)
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Bill Cole
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Charles Marcus
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FiL ＠ Kpoxa
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Scott Silva
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Timo Sirainen
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Timothy Murphy
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Timothy Murphy
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Troy Engel