Brian Candler wrote:

On Sun, Apr 04, 2010 at 11:48:55PM -0700, minim wrote:

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I have to take two copy of incoming mails on different servers(local & remote). I am using plain server without any panel on it and using sendmail, pop3 server Dovecot.

Is there a way(any configurations) to take a remote backup for all incoming mails? except configuring forwarder to each mail ID !!!!

Oh yes, quite a few:

• Do it on delivery (by configuring your MTA to deliver to two places at once)

• Use a tool like imapsync to replicate the mailboxes using IMAP periodically

• Use filesystem-level replication (e.g. rsync/unison, ZFS mirroring)

• Use block-level replication (e.g. drbd, Netapp snap-mirror)

Which you use will depend partly on what the replica is being used for, e.g. just for archive/audit; how quickly it has to be in sync; what happens when the remote replica is unreachable; and whether you want to be able to failover to the replica for 'live' use, and fail back again.

B.

Thanks for responding. Is it possible to configure MTA to deliver to remote servers? I have tried with imapsync and able to transfer single mail account to remote server. Is there a way to transfer whole server's mail account using imapsync?

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Steffen Kaiser-9 wrote:

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On Tue, 6 Apr 2010, minim wrote:

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mails? except configuring forwarder to each mail ID !!!!

...

Is it possible to configure MTA to deliver to remote servers?

sendmail can deliver to TCP or Unix socket or via a program. But sendmail cannot deliver the same message twice, once the delivery takes place. As you do not want to add a forward or alias for each account, which probably can be created automatically, you could add a wrapper around your LDA/MDA, that copies the cloned message to yet another system, e.g.:

normal:

/etc/mail/smrsh/dovecot-deliver -f $g -d $u

Wrapper:

/etc/mail/smrsh/wrapper --mode sendmail -f $g -d $u -m $h

=== #!/bin/bash

tmpf=/tmp/wrap.$$.tmp trap 'rc=$?; rm -f '$tmpf' 2> /dev/null;exit $rc' EXIT

cat - > $tmpf || exit /etc/mail/smrsh/dovecot-deliver "$@" < $tmpf || exit #ssh otherserver /etc/mail/smrsh/dovecot-deliver "$@" < $tmpf exit 0

The #ssh line is to forward the message.

you could code a LMTP proxy, sendmail then talks LMTP to the LDA, which splits its input, in order to forward the commands to another LMTP server and calls Dovecot's deliver locally.

BTW: rsync works (see mailing list) reasonably well.

Regards,

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Steffen Kaiser -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

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Thanks for responding :) Where and how should I use the below wrappers? /etc/mail/smrsh/wrapper --mode sendmail -f $g -d $u -m $h

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Thanks for your lot more help :)

(-f $g -d $u -m $h) - What are these three options???

Right now I have /etc/smrsh/wrapper and I can find the below line in my sendmail.mc file.

******** FEATURE(smrsh', /usr/sbin/smrsh')dnl ***************

How should I make changes in sendmail.mc file and Is this the only change I should make for things to work??

Thanks in advance.

Steffen Kaiser-9 wrote:

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On Thu, 8 Apr 2010, minim wrote:

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Where and how should I use the below wrappers?

You are meddling with the local delivery section of your MTA setup. If you are using sendmail's mc files, change it there. Sadly, lots of distros make the configuration of sendmail "easy" via GUIs, so look there.

...

/etc/mail/smrsh/wrapper --mode sendmail -f $g -d $u -m $h ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Remove --mode sendmail, I forgot to remove the arguments, they are part of my personal patches only.

Regards,

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On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 04:59:11AM -0700, minim wrote:

Is it possible to configure MTA to deliver to remote servers?

Certainly. For any complex mail delivery requirements, I'd say that exim is your friend. You can set up routers and transports to do whatever you like.

This is out of the scope of dovecot of course, but the exim-users mailing list will be helpful if you get stuck.

I have tried with imapsync and able to transfer single mail account to remote server. Is there a way to transfer whole server's mail account using imapsync?

I don't think so, not without some major frigs; you'd need the login credentials of each user to establish the imap connections.

This is where filesystem-level synchronisation like unison may help. I'd strongly recommend Maildir format, and you may get problems if users frequently access their mailboxes on both the primary and the backup servers, because you may end up with conflicting changes made at both sides. Using Maildir, no mail should be lost, but there may be conflicts over metadata like message flags and UIDs.

If you're keeping the backup just for disaster recovery, it should be fine.

(I use unison for syncing Maildirs between my desktop and laptop all the time, but I access the Maildirs directly using mutt, rather than via IMAP)

B.