On Fri, November 9, 2012 1:10 am, Odhiambo Washington wrote:

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Patrick Shirkey pshirkey@boosthardware.comwrote:

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On Fri, November 9, 2012 12:13 am, Odhiambo Washington wrote:

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On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Patrick Shirkey

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wrote:

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On Thu, November 8, 2012 7:21 pm, Robert Schetterer wrote:

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Am 08.11.2012 08:48, schrieb Patrick Shirkey:

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Hi,

I have an exim4 and dovecot system. The system has multiple

accounts.

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Exim4 is receiving emails in the /var/mail/user files and dovecot is configured to use /home/user/mail (mbox) folder.

I have one account that dovecot is not processing replies/bounces/etc... The data is being written in the /var/mail/user file by exim4 but as far as dovecot is aware there is nothing in the pop3 inbox.

Can anyone suggest how I can enable dovecot to know that the data is in the /var/mail/user file and deliver it to the pop3 inbox for this account?

-- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd

show logs and config like doveconf -n

There is nothing in the dovecot logs afaict

echo "my test" | mail -s "test message" test@xxx

2012-11-08 08:34:38 1TWNZO-0000TG-8s <= root@xxx U=root P=local S=398 2012-11-08 08:34:38 1TWNZO-0000TG-8s => xxx test@xxx R=local_user T=mail_spool 2012-11-08 08:34:38 1TWNZO-0000TG-8s Completed

exim -bt test@xxx R: system_aliases for xxx@localhost R: userforward for xxx@localhost R: procmail for xxx@localhost R: maildrop for xxx@localhost R: lowuid_aliases for xxx@localhost (UID 1238) R: local_user for xxx@localhost xxx@localhost <-- test@xxx router = local_user, transport = mail_spool

• Here's the dovecot config:

dovecot -n

# 1.2.15: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf # OS: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 x86_64 Debian 6.0.6 log_timestamp: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S protocols: pop3 pop3s listen: 127.0.0.1 login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login login_executable: /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3-login mail_privileged_group: mail mail_location: mbox:~/mail mail_debug: yes mbox_write_locks: fcntl dotlock mail_executable: /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3 mail_plugin_dir: /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/pop3 auth default: debug: yes passdb: driver: pam userdb: driver: passwd

You are telling dovecot that mails are in mbox format (why you even use mbox instead of Maildir++ beats me, but that's not what you asked for help with) and are stored in /home/$user/mbox so go ahead at also tell Exim to deliver to the same location! If you want Exim to deliver to /var/mail/$user then change your mail_location in dovecot.conf to point to this too.

Thanks for your advice. I inherited this system and it is a live B2B system so I am trying not to break it as well as to keep it running :-)

I have seen some unusual behaviour now.

1: According to my script to process the inbox for each account the pop3 account was empty. The code was previously working for many months. I thought it might be related to the missing mail_location directive because the home/xxx/mail folder was missing for the specific account that was having a problem so I added it as above but it didn't appear to fix the problem.

You DO NOT need to add it manually. All you have to do is to send a test mail to the user and the mbox will be created with the correct permissions.

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2: I modified it as suggested : mail_location = INBOX=/var/mail/%u

That gave me an error

Nov 8 13:47:03 mail dovecot: POP3(xxx): mail_location: Ambiguous mail location setting, don't know what to do with it: INBOX=/var/mail/xxx (try prefixing it with mbox: or maildir:) Nov 8 13:47:03 mail dovecot: POP3(xxx): Fatal: Namespace initialization failed

You must RTFM. The examples are in conf.d/10-mail.conf and they have the following text:

<quote> ## Mailbox locations and namespaces ##

# Location for users' mailboxes. The default is empty, which means that Dovecot # tries to find the mailboxes automatically. This won't work if the user # doesn't yet have any mail, so you should explicitly tell Dovecot the full # location. # # If you're using mbox, giving a path to the INBOX file (eg. /var/mail/%u) # isn't enough. You'll also need to tell Dovecot where the other mailboxes are # kept. This is called the "root mail directory", and it must be the first # path given in the mail_location setting. # # There are a few special variables you can use, eg.: # # %u - username # %n - user part in user@domain, same as %u if there's no domain # %d - domain part in user@domain, empty if there's no domain # %h - home directory # # See doc/wiki/Variables.txt for full list. Some examples: # # mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir # mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u # mail_location = mbox:/var/mail/%d/%1n/%n:INDEX=/var/indexes/%d/%1n/%n # # </quote>

... make sense?

Starting to now.

My first attempt to *not* break the existing system was to try with the following:

mail_location = mbox:~/mail

But that didn't work so I asked here and according to your first email it seemed this config was necessary:

mail_location = INBOX=/var/mail/%u

But after re reading the docs it appears that *both* locations are required:

mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

-- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd