[Dovecot] What about saving your INBOX at ~/mbox ?
Hi, folks. I'm testing out RedHat's "Fedora Core 2" release, which has switched from the old WashU imapd to dovecot-0.99.10. Overall, this looks like a really, really good move on their part: it looks like a very sweet little tool without some of the ingrained idiocy of Mark Crispin insisting that every home directory consist of nothing but mbox files and allowing you to use a configurable subdirectory by default, ~/mail.
Cool.
There is one feature of the old WashU imapd that I miss, though. That daemonn could be configured to automatically transfer the user's email to the "~/mbox" upon activation of the daemon, effectively reducing the size of the /var/spool/mail/{username}" mail spool and helping keep the user's disk usage in their home directories, not in /var/spool/mail. This can be a good thing for various reasons.
But I don't see any way to enable that behavior for dovecot. Is there something I'm missing, or do folks feel it would be reasonable to add?
--
Nico Kadel-Garcia
Systems Engineer
Mitsubish Electric Research Lab
<nkadel@merl.com>Am 21.05.2004 um 8:30 Uhr -0400 schrieb Nico Kadel-Garcia:
There is one feature of the old WashU imapd that I miss, though. That daemonn could be configured to automatically transfer the user's email to the "~/mbox" upon activation of the daemon, effectively reducing the size of the /var/spool/mail/{username}" mail spool and helping keep the user's disk usage in their home directories, not in /var/spool/mail. This can be a good thing for various reasons.
But I don't see any way to enable that behavior for dovecot. Is there something I'm missing, or do folks feel it would be reasonable to add?
By chance, I have just set that up. :)
My default mailbox goes to ~/Mail/INBOX; adjust to your liking. Set up sendmail/postfix/whatever to use maildrop as your local mailer, add
DEFAULT=$HOME/Mail/INBOX
to /etc/courier/maildroprc
and set
default_mail_env = mbox:~/Mail:INBOX=%h/Mail/INBOX
-- that's all.
HTH, hauke
-- Hauke Fath /~\ The ASCII Ribbon Campaign Institut für Nachrichtentechnik \ / No HTML/RTF in email TU Darmstadt X No Word docs in email Ruf +49-6151-16-3281, Fax -3778 / \ Respect for open standards
----- Original Message ----- From: "Hauke Fath" <hf@spg.tu-darmstadt.de> To: "Nico Kadel-Garcia" <nkadel@merl.com> Cc: <dovecot@dovecot.org> Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 11:37 AM Subject: Re: [Dovecot] What about saving your INBOX at ~/mbox ?
Am 21.05.2004 um 8:30 Uhr -0400 schrieb Nico Kadel-Garcia:
There is one feature of the old WashU imapd that I miss, though. That daemonn could be configured to automatically transfer the user's email to the "~/mbox" upon activation of the daemon, effectively reducing the size of the /var/spool/mail/{username}" mail spool and helping keep the user's disk usage in their home directories, not in /var/spool/mail. This can be a good thing for various reasons.
But I don't see any way to enable that behavior for dovecot. Is there something I'm missing, or do folks feel it would be reasonable to add?
By chance, I have just set that up. :)
[ Configuration to alter delivery of mail to ~/{arbitrary-location} deleted. ]
Your approach is not unreasonable. It does require modifying sendmail, rather than putting the behavior in the IMAP daemon where the WashU daemon did it. It also pretty automatically does it for *ALL* users, which is a bad idea for cases when the user's home directory is NFS mounted and may be unavailable at a particular time.
The WashU imapd also didn't do this transfer unless the ~/mbox file already existed. It seems to me that, in such circumstances and if I wanted to do it before the IMAP daemon was active, I'd use a procmail recipe to deliver it to the user's mbox. But in that case, if the file transfer fails for whatever reason, the messages would be left behind in /var/spool/mail/%u. And if I'm using user's ~/.procmailrc's, I have all sorts of weirdness for any potentially NFS mounted home directories.
Am 21.05.2004 um 13:58 Uhr -0400 schrieb Nico Kadel-Garcia:
Your approach is not unreasonable. It does require modifying sendmail, rather than putting the behavior in the IMAP daemon where the WashU daemon did it.
Well, if you call adding
define(LOCAL_MAILER_PATH', /usr/pkg/bin/maildrop')dnl
define(LOCAL_MAILER_FLAGS', SPfhn')dnl
define(LOCAL_MAILER_ARGS', maildrop -d $u')dnl
to your favourite .mc config 'modifying sendmail'... You'll want a reasonable local mailer, anyway, for server-side filtering.
hauke-- Hauke Fath /~\ The ASCII Ribbon Campaign Institut für Nachrichtentechnik \ / No HTML/RTF in email TU Darmstadt X No Word docs in email Ruf +49-6151-16-3281, Fax -3778 / \ Respect for open standards
On Fri, 2004-05-21 at 15:30, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
There is one feature of the old WashU imapd that I miss, though. That daemonn could be configured to automatically transfer the user's email to the "~/mbox" upon activation of the daemon, effectively reducing the size of the /var/spool/mail/{username}" mail spool and helping keep the user's disk usage in their home directories, not in /var/spool/mail. This can be a good thing for various reasons.
Oh, so there are actually some reasons for the ~/mbox moving? :) Maybe I'll implement it for 1.0, but there's no quick fix.
Le 05/22/2004 04:40 AM, Timo Sirainen a écrit :
Oh, so there are actually some reasons for the ~/mbox moving? :) Maybe I'll implement it for 1.0, but there's no quick fix.
Hi,
Is there any news about this feature ? There are several cases where the migration to Dovecot would be much easier if mail continued to be moved to ~/mbox.
-- Nico L'amour est à la portée de tous, mais l'amitié est l'épreuve du coeur. -+- Alfred D'Houdetot (1799-1860) -+-
On 20.8.2004, at 23:11, Nicolas STRANSKY wrote:
Le 05/22/2004 04:40 AM, Timo Sirainen a écrit :
Oh, so there are actually some reasons for the ~/mbox moving? :) Maybe I'll implement it for 1.0, but there's no quick fix.
Hi,
Is there any news about this feature ? There are several cases where the migration to Dovecot would be much easier if mail continued to be moved to ~/mbox.
Still only in my TODO with no immediate plans to implement it. It's kind of ugly and kludgy feature. Why not just set MTA to send the mails into ~/mbox directly?
I still haven't really figured out why it would be useful, except as for backwards compatibility?
participants (4)
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Hauke Fath
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Nico Kadel-Garcia
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Nicolas STRANSKY
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Timo Sirainen