January 2006 - dovecot

[Dovecot] new configure-option --disable-index
by Marten Lehmann 22 Jan '06

22 Jan '06

Hello, I experimented with dovecot the whole evening yesterday and the mailserver worked fine since there haven't been that much users connecting to it. I'm using dovecot 1.0.alpha5 as pop3 and pop3s server. The maildirs are mounted through NFS and since there is no nfslockd running I disabled mmap in the config and told dovecot to use dotlock. Also I experienced, that dovecot was much faster when using one login-process per connection instead of sharing them throughout several connections. Sharings seems to be a greater performance problem (bottleneck) than additional fork()s. However, under normal load at business time the server load increased to a value that made it impossible to download emails without timeouts, so we switched back to tcpserver/qmail-pop3d for pop3 and only kept dovecot for doing the pop3s part. Dovecot is really fine, but it still isn't NFS ready. Especially when using dovecot as pop3 only this index-stuff must be disengageable. What is the use of generating a complex index file for hundreds of messages, that will be deleted in the next step after downloading them? But the index is also a problem when using IMAP over NFS. Access to the files is too slow, so the connections keep hanging around and the i/o waiting value is raised to a maximum which slows down the whole machine. It simply doesn't make sense to build and update an index every time the maildir is accessed (which is very cpu and timeconsuming), while search operations (the only moment when the index is actually used and not just heavily updated) don't affect even 1% of all IMAP calls (and such a command doesn't even exist for pop3). I would be much obliged if you could create an option called "--disable-index" in the configure-script or something like "disable-index = yes" in dovecot.conf that makes dovecot ignoring existing index files and doesn't care for related operations, so NFS should work much faster and IMAP search would simply parse the files directly instead of looking in the index. I would really appriciate this very much and I'm absolutely sure, that a lot of people beside me are waiting for this. Regards Marten

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[Dovecot] core files
by jared 22 Jan '06

22 Jan '06

Hey all: Was playing around with kill -11 on dovecot processes to see which ones would dump core and which ones wouldn't. If ulimit is correct dovecot and dovecot-auth will dump. If you perform the recommended (Set mail_drop_priv_before_exec = yes in config file) step, imap will also dump core. But I'm unable to force imap-login to dump core. I'm curious if this is possible without the linux kernel patch that's recommended on http://dovecot.org/bugreport.html. (BTW tried the patch on my 2.4.18 kernel but the patch had all kinds of errors.) Thanks, Jared DeMott

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[Dovecot] Assertation failed when trying to login twice in one session
by Steffen Kaiser 22 Jan '06

22 Jan '06

Hello, this command: echo "user testu pass q" ; sleep 5; echo "user testu pass test quit" | nc localhost pop3 results in this assert: dovecot: Jan 20 10:16:09 Error: auth(default_with_listener): file auth-client-connection.c: line 33 (auth_client_send): assertion failed: (conn->refcount > 1) dovecot: Jan 20 10:16:09 Error: child 18656 (auth) killed with signal 6 without listener: dovecot: Jan 20 10:24:07 Error: auth(default): file auth-client-connection.c: line 33 (auth_client_send): assertion failed: (conn->refcount > 1) dovecot: Jan 20 10:24:07 Error: child 18733 (auth) killed with signal 6 The password of user 'testu' is 'test' :) The same with IMAP: 1 login q q 1 NO Authentication failed. 2 login testu test 2 OK Logged in. 3 SELECT INBOX * FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Seen \Draft) * OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Seen \Draft \*)] Flags permitted. * 0 EXISTS * 0 RECENT * OK [UIDVALIDITY 1137748810] UIDs valid * OK [UIDNEXT 1] Predicted next UID 3 OK [READ-WRITE] Select completed. The connection is OK, though. dovecot: Jan 20 10:19:26 Info: imap(testu): maildir: root=/home/testu/MailDir, index=, control=/var/spool/dovecot/30001, inbox= dovecot: Jan 20 10:19:27 Error: auth(default): file auth-client-connection.c: line 33 (auth_client_send): assertion failed: (conn->refcount > 1) dovecot: Jan 20 10:19:27 Error: child 18710 (auth) killed with signal 6 Bye, -- Steffen Kaiser

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[Dovecot] dovecot 1.0beta1 making base_dir world-writable
by Brad 22 Jan '06

22 Jan '06

I can also confirm this, on my own mail server since upgrading to beta1. Dovecot always makes the base_dir world-writable on startup. ----- Forwarded message from Oleg Safiullin <form(a)pdp-11.org.ru> ----- Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 07:09:17 +0600 From: Oleg Safiullin <form(a)pdp-11.org.ru> To: brad(a)openbsd.org Subject: dovecot 1.0beta1 Hi. After update dovecot to 1.0beta1 some strange thing happens -- during startup it says "fixing permissions for /var/dovecot to make it world-readable", but actually it makes it world-writable. Please look at it. WBR //form ----- End forwarded message -----

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[Dovecot] Simultaneous POP login - inbox corrumption
by John Woodell 22 Jan '06

22 Jan '06

When two POP clients connect to the same account, within a second or two, the inbox can get corrumpted. Here is a sample of the first few lines of the corrumpted inboxes... # 1-- # # # From... # # > # # From.. # 4504 # # From... # 7-- # # # From... # 4504 # # From... # # > # # From... # 868-- # # From...

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[Dovecot] 1.0 beta 1 feature request: passwd-file vs. prefetch
by Matthias Andree 22 Jan '06

22 Jan '06

Greetings, it appears as though 1.0.beta1 doesn't support "userdb prefetch {}" with "passdb passwd-file { arg=/etc/mailpasswd }" even if the latter contains all necessary information. Is this planned for a future version or would the benefits be too small to justify that? Another idea: can userdb prefetch {} fall back to retrying the passdb entries to see if they come up with useful information? -- Matthias Andree

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[Dovecot] Mail.app message numbering for deleted messages
by jcn-dovecot＠pith.org 22 Jan '06

22 Jan '06

I'm having a strange problem that appeared when I upgraded from .99something to 1.0alpha3 and then disappeared for a while and then re-appeared when I upgraded to 1.0alpha5. I am using mbox and IMAP in Apple's Mail.app to read my mail. When I delete a message in Mail.app, the message gets marked as deleted in the spool and it disappears from the mail listing in Mail. However, the message number does not change until I either manually flush the deleted messages through mail, or I go offline which deletes the messages from the spool. I have mbox_lazy_writes set to 'no' but this didn't seem to have any effect on the behavior. I never saw this type of behavior with UW-IMAP either, which is what I migrated from. Thanks.

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[Dovecot] can I hide or delete the message "don't delete this message -- folder internal data" ?
by Felipe Stuardo 22 Jan '06

22 Jan '06

sorry for my english... is possible that i can hide or delete the message "don't delete this message -- folder internal data" ? this message is see from all accounts of my mail server. i have a system with: Fedora Core 4 dovecot-0.99.14-4.fc4 sendmail-8.13.4-2 thanks _______________________________________________________________________ Advertencia: Este mensaje contiene la opinion personal del remitente y la Universidad Catolica Nuestra Senora de la Asuncion no asume responsabilidad alguna con relacion al contenido del presente mensaje. Cualquier consulta realizar por favor a sysadmin(a)uca.edu.py . Protected by LED

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[Dovecot] in a major jam... authentication
by tallison1 22 Jan '06

22 Jan '06

I was upgrading my debian box and managed to upgrade my dovecot installation at the same time. I wasn't planning on it, but it came along just the same. I took some notes on what I thought I needed to change, but apparently it wasn't enough. I've been running this for quite some time now with pgsql authentication and it's been one of those nice applications that always behave themselves. Until now. I can connect to the database. But I always fail the authentication. From the logs I'm coming in on a PLAIN authentication and failing on "password mismatch" The database hasn't changed the password in years. The database stores the password as (I believe) an md5 encryption of the real password. Whatever it is, it is definitely encrypted in the table. What I had in my configuration file was something like this: disable_plaintext_auth = no (this was marked as the default and I enforced it in the new file) auth_mechanisms = plain auth_passdb = pgsql:/etc/dovecot/dovecot-pgsql.conf auth_user = root login = imap I have updated the configuration as follows: dovecot-pgsql.conf 'driver = pgsql' 'default_pass_scheme = PLAIN-MD5' ( I tried changing this to PLAIN but it didn't help ) dovecot.conf protocols = imap disable_plaintext_auth = no protocol imap { } protocol pop3 { } auth default { mechanisms = plain passdb pam { } passdb sql { args = /etc/dovecot/dovecot-pgsql.conf } userdb passwd { } user = root } I'm not sure what to try now, all I know is that my IMAP server is just dead and I'm unable to get the authentication working again. I can't find much that says how to set this up again and am reluctant to just start trying stuff.

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[Dovecot] plain text auth
by ohp＠pyrenet.fr 22 Jan '06

22 Jan '06

Hi everyone, This is my second try with dovecot, and still no luck. What I want is twig to work with dovecot on the localhost address . I need to authenticate through pam for real accounts and through pgsql for virtual ones. I just cant autenticate: logs are : imap-:login: Authenticate PLAIN failed: Unsupported authentication mechanism or: Aborted login: method = PLAIN Could someone please share a working config file that does what I want? I'm struggling for weeks now both on tyhe alpha5 and beta1 versions. TIA -- Olivier PRENANT Tel: +33-5-61-50-97-00 (Work) 15, Chemin des Monges +33-5-61-50-97-01 (Fax) 31190 AUTERIVE +33-6-07-63-80-64 (GSM) FRANCE Email: ohp(a)pyrenet.fr ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Make your life a dream, make your dream a reality. (St Exupery)

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