[dovecot] dovecot replacing uw-imap
Hey, I'm trying to sort out how to make dovecot replace uw-imap cleanly. But I have the following problems/questions:
- Why is mbox support limited to user-owned directories?
- Would it be possible to have dovecot target a different place than ~user/mail by default, specfically some place like /var/path/to/maildirs/userdir/
I'd like to move all my mail storage out of user homedirs and to central space on my mail server, increasing reliability and helping me manage disk space usage for readily.
In order to use dovecot I need a migration path and that path looks like it will need mbox outside of the users homedirs and pottentially outside of solely user-owned directories.
-sv
- On 2002.12.19, in 1040311765.17838.12.camel@opus,
- "seth vidal" skvidal@phy.duke.edu wrote:
- Would it be possible to have dovecot target a different place than ~user/mail by default, specfically some place like /var/path/to/maildirs/userdir/ ... In order to use dovecot I need a migration path and that path looks like it will need mbox outside of the users homedirs and pottentially outside of solely user-owned directories.
We had a similar need with uw-imap -- we had 25,000 users in /var/mail, and wanted to split them out across multiple subdirectories. The route we chose for this is actually pretty flexible, and configurable from outside of the imap server process. It should be usable in dovecot, too, if anyone wants to investigate. It's just a link library, and using it inside any arbitrary application can be as simple as 1 or 2 lines of C.
There's a readme at http://home.uchicago.edu/~dgc/sw/mailpath/README and the package itself is at http://home.uchicago.edu/~dgc/sw/mailpath/mailpath-1.0.tar.gz http://home.uchicago.edu/~dgc/sw/mailpath/mailpath-1.0.tar.gz.sig
This isn't a product in any formal sense, and it's not supported by anyone in particular; it's just what I wrote for internal use at our site. But if it seems useful, I'd be glad to answer questions once you read the README. :)
-- -D. dgc@uchicago.edu NSIT University of Chicago We're the colon in ://
On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 07:28:36PM -0600, David Champion wrote:
We had a similar need with uw-imap -- we had 25,000 users in /var/mail, and wanted to split them out across multiple subdirectories. The route we chose for this is actually pretty flexible, and configurable from outside of the imap server process. It should be usable in dovecot, too, if anyone wants to investigate. It's just a link library, and using it inside any arbitrary application can be as simple as 1 or 2 lines of C.
'"Overkill" is my middle name.'
Yeah. :) CVS Dovecot has already default_mail_path which supports $U as username. Using your idea of supporting $1U $2U etc. to limit it to first 1 or 2 chars could be good enough idea to implement by default. Other than that, I don't see much use for the rest of the variables. Hmm. Except maybe separating "user@domain" username so that you could use path like /var/mail/domain/user/.
- On 2002.12.19, in 20021220021017.GA26615@irccrew.org,
- "Timo Sirainen" tss@iki.fi wrote:
Yeah. :) CVS Dovecot has already default_mail_path which supports $U as username. Using your idea of supporting $1U $2U etc. to limit it to first 1 or 2 chars could be good enough idea to implement by default. Other than that, I don't see much use for the rest of the variables. Hmm. Except maybe
No, there's not a lot of use in most cases, but most of them were possibilities we had pondered at one point or another. The real value of the library, to me, is just the flexiblity it affords -- because a site might have many products that need to interoperate, tying the admins to a particular arrangement of folder paths can be frustrating. Especially when making transitions from one product to another.
Using home directories embedded in the path to folders is something we might yet switch to -- with so many users on a single system, it's all about balancing users across multiple filesystems. Because our users exist on the mail server and, separately, on a login server, the home directory path is a useful way of tracking that for multiple systems.
The modulus operator was useful at one point, too... but I'm not sure how much use it is for me to go defending each thing mailpath can do, when the real point is that it can satisfy lots of needs without binding particular software to particular disk configurations.
Everything gets weird when you support many thousands of users in one place....
Anyway, just an offering -- if anyone does need this, it's out there. We've gotten to where we don't particularly expect our applications to fit our environment without some patching. :)
separating "user@domain" username so that you could use path like /var/mail/domain/user/.
That would be handy.
-- -D. dgc@uchicago.edu NSIT University of Chicago We're the colon in ://
On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 10:29:24AM -0500, seth vidal wrote:
I'm trying to sort out how to make dovecot replace uw-imap cleanly. But I have the following problems/questions:
- Why is mbox support limited to user-owned directories?
Dovecot currently only supports keeping all IMAP folders in under one drectory. You'd want keep INBOX elsewhere than rest of the IMAP folders? Symlinks would allow that currently. Maybe I should allow inbox elsewhere too .. only problem is that I'm not sure how that should be configured. Maybe the MAIL environment would have multiple parts with mbox, like:
mbox:/home/$U/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/$U:Trash=/tmp/$U
First being the default IMAP folder path, rest being named mailboxes or folders elsewhere.
- Would it be possible to have dovecot target a different place than ~user/mail by default, specfically some place like /var/path/to/maildirs/userdir/
default_mail_env = /var/path/to/maildirs/$U/
Works in CVS.
In order to use dovecot I need a migration path and that path looks like it will need mbox outside of the users homedirs and pottentially outside of solely user-owned directories.
Hm. Or did I understand it right above, what do you mean with "outside user-owned directories"? Single mailboxes in non-owned dir or folders just outsde home dir? Latter shouldn't matter where they are, as long as Dovecot has write access to them.
participants (3)
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David Champion
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seth vidal
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Timo Sirainen