June 2012 - dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] moving from BSD to Ubuntu
by spamvoll＠googlemail.com 30 Jun '12

30 Jun '12

hi.. im planning to move my Mailserver from an FreeBSD Box to an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Box. Both Boxes run Dovecot 2.0 Does anyone did this before and experienced any problems ? Downtime is no problem, my plan is to stop Dovecot on the Bsd Box and copy all Mailbox files to the Uuntu system and start dovecot. Regards Hans

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Re: [Dovecot] started with dovecot sieve
by Daniel Parthey 30 Jun '12

30 Jun '12

Rolf wrote: > Am 2012-06-25 23:59, schrieb Daniel Parthey: > >Hi Rolf, > > > >Rolf wrote: > >>Jun 25 20:22:54 rolf14 dovecot: lda(rolf): Error: setegid(privileged) failed: Operation not permitted Doesn't lda(rolf) mean it is being executed under user "rolf", not root or dovecot? How exactly do you invoke lda from your /etc/postfix/master.cf? You might also try to use LMTP via TCP to deliver mails from postfix to dovecot to work around any permission problems. > I have installed dovecot and docecot-sieve by Debians aptitude You don't seem to be the only one with these problems, see Debian BTS: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=626130 > As far as I understand the "ps -f ax" output (see > below) dovecot runs with root privileges and postfix runs with its > own user privileges. > > root 20998 1 0 Jun25 ? Ss 0:03 /usr/sbin/dovecot -c /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf Well, the master process often runs as root, but child processes like lda may be configured to run as an unprivileged, or even as the user which owns the mailbox. > The mbox files below /var/mail are owned by > their respective users and have "mail" as their group, both can > write, world can do nothing. I added every related system user to > the mail group, also restarted postfix and dovecot. > root@rolf14:/var/mail# more /etc/group | grep mail: mail:x:8:amavis,dovecot,clamav,postfix User "rolf" is not a member of group "mail", but I don't think he needs to be, otherwise he would be able to read the mails of all users on the system and this would be a security risk. > As I understand it, postfix activates the lda "deliver" as user > "postfix". Therefore it should be able to write to the mboxes at > /var/mail. If needed dovecot can write there as well. The lda should rather switch to the owner of the respective INBOX, e.g. /var/mail/rolf. Log message "lda(rolf)" looks like this happens. To summarize, I think LMTP will be the easiest way to fix the permission problems. Otherwise you would need to fiddle out how to prevent dovecot lda from switching to group additional group "mail", since unprivileged user "rolf" is not allowed to do that. Regards, Daniel -- https://plus.google.com/103021802792276734820

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[Dovecot] how to announce shared folders to clients using non-default mail prefix
by Tom Lieuallen 30 Jun '12

30 Jun '12

We're using dovecot 2.1.3 and I've been doing some testing with 2.1.7. We have shared mail (maildir) folders working along with our default mbox mailboxes. Our problem is trying to get this to work in a reasonable fashion with our iPhone or iPad mail.app clients. It's well known that they don't honor the subscription list; they show all available mail folders and do not collapse trees of folders. I have 381 folders in directories under mail. Normal clients are fine, but this is unmanageable in IOS. What we have been doing is changing the mail prefix for the iPhone to a subfolder, then using soft links to point to the most commonly used folders we use. This works, but when one changes the mail prefix, any shared folders are not presented. I'm suspicious that this is a design decision. If there is some way to make it work, I'd be very grateful. Note the two 'sharedimap' folders listed in the first 'list'. Note that if I change the prefix for that shared namespace to 'iphonemail/', it does present my shared folders as well as anything in a personal iphonemail directory. However, 'select' didn't work with the personal folders. My guess is it's mostly due to the difference in mail formats between the two (mbox & maildir). But, it does show that somewhere in the code it's checking the mail prefix against namespaces and not displaying shared folders in non-default prefixes. I wish this were a configurable option. thank you Tom Lieuallen Oregon State University . list "" * * LIST (\Noselect \HasChildren) "/" "foo1" * LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" "foo1/folder1" * LIST (\Noselect \HasChildren) "/" "iphonemail" * LIST (\NoInferiors \Marked) "/" "iphonemail/foo1" * LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" "Sent" * LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked) "/" "Trash" * LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "INBOX" * LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "sharedimap/cesupport" * LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "sharedimap/mimesupport" . OK List completed. . list "iphonemail/" * * LIST (\NoInferiors \Marked) "/" "iphonemail/foo1" . OK List completed. =============== # 2.1.7: /private/dovecot/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf # OS: SunOS 5.10 sun4v auth_debug = yes auth_verbose = yes default_client_limit = 10245 default_process_limit = 5120 first_valid_uid = 100 mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u:INDEX=/a2/imap-index/%u mail_nfs_storage = yes mail_plugins = quota acl namespace { inbox = yes location = prefix = separator = / type = private } namespace { hidden = yes inbox = no list = children location = maildir:/a1/dove-shared:INDEX=/a2/imap-index/dove-shared/%u prefix = sharedimap/ separator = / type = shared } passdb { driver = pam } passdb { args = scheme=CRYPT username_format=%u /private/dovecot/etc/passwd driver = passwd-file } plugin { acl = vfile quota = fs:INBOX:mount=/a1 quota2 = fs:Home quota:mount=%h } protocols = imap lmtp service imap-login { inet_listener imaps { port = 993 ssl = yes } process_min_avail = 16 service_count = 1 } service imap { process_limit = 2048 } ssl_ca = </private/ssl/certs/SSL_CA_Bundle.pem ssl_cert = </private/ssl/certs/mail.crt ssl_key = </private/ssl/certs/mail.key userdb { driver = passwd } userdb { args = username_format=%u /private/dovecot/etc/passwd driver = passwd-file } protocol imap { mail_plugins = quota acl imap_quota imap_acl } protocol pop3 { pop3_uidl_format = %08Xv%08Xu }

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[Dovecot] Adding IMAP SORT and THREAD Extensions but THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT functionality to Dovecot 2.x.y !
by Oooo1 30 Jun '12

30 Jun '12

Hi. Can somebody add IMAP SORT and THREAD Extensions THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT function to the just next version of Dovecot ? It is necessary to GroupWare server. At the moment I have made it workable together, but there is one unstable point, as I have understood SOGo needs THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT sorting functions and if it not to get it, GroupWare server makes unworkable some of its component. If it needs additional info, you are welcome.

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[Dovecot] What does "namespace inbox {..." mean
by Jonathan Ryshpan 30 Jun '12

30 Jun '12

I'm trying to set up a dovecot server for which mail arrives in an mbox, and mail is stored in a maildir. The wiki (see http://wiki.dovecot.org/Namespaces) refers to this as "Mixed mbox and Maildir". It advises handling this situation by creating two namespaces: one for the mbox and the other for the maildir. On the other hand the sample configuration coming with dovecot in my distro puts inbox in a namespace starting with: namespace inbox { # Namespace type: private, shared or public #type = private It appears from the wiki that the word following the namespace declarator (if this is the right word) should be either "public", "shared", or "private", and describes a property of the namespace being declared. So what does: namespace inbox {... mean? Similarly in another part of the wiki (see http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/Virtual) I read that it's possible to have namespace virtual { namespace real { ... which only increases my perplexity. Please advise! Thanks - jon

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[Dovecot] Preferred LDAP Attribute for home/mail location
by Edgar Fuß 29 Jun '12

29 Jun '12

Is there, among the dovocot community, any preferred LDAP schema and attribute to use for setting the home/mail storage location? Some people seem to use the qmail schema, some a Jamm schema (whatever that is), and Markus Effinger has even created a dovecot schema (https://www.effinger.org/blog/2009/01/11/eigenes-ldap-schema-erstellen/) There may be more. I could even create my own given we have been assigned an official OID a decade ago anyway. However, sometimes I prefer to use what most other people do. I would effectively only need to store the name of the relevant NFS server.

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Re: [Dovecot] RAID1+md concat+XFS as mailstorage
by Dr Josef Karthauser 29 Jun '12

29 Jun '12

Kelsey Cummings wrote: > On 06/28/12 05:56, Ed W wrote: >> So given the statistics show us that 2 disk failures are much more >> common than we expect, and that "silent corruption" is likely occurring >> within (larger) real world file stores, there really aren't many battle >> tested options that can protect against this - really only RAID6 right >> now and that has significant limitations... > > Has anyone tried or benchmarked ZFS, perhaps ZFS+NFS as backing store > for spools? Sorry if I've missed it and this has already come up. > We're using Netapp/NFS, and are likely to continue to do so but still > curious. Hi Kelsey, We're running ZFS here, and have just started using dovecot on it. No stats yet to report, but you might be interested in this edge case. One of our server started behaving badly... the database would randomly crash and not restart due to corrupted indexed. It turns out that the memory had gone bad, and that it had been bad for a while. Disk blocks were getting corrupted on read, and some on write! Luckly because we were on ZFS, which checksums all data, we were able to detect and repair most of the data (some 80mb of bad blocks distributed evenly thoughout the entire file system!) automatically, and also know exactly which files were unrecoverable (in the end just two or three files!). Also, we have hourly snapshots of all the file systems, so we were able to recover older versions of those files with minimal loss. I will never rely on a non-checksumming file system for production use again, for data that is existed to persist over time. Joe

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[Dovecot] auth service: out of memory
by Mailing List SVR 29 Jun '12

29 Jun '12

Hi, I have some out of memory errors in my logs (file errors.txt attached) I'm using dovecot 2.0.19, I can see some memory leaks fix in hg after the 2.0.19 release but they seem related to imap-login service, I attached my config too, is something wrong there? Should I really increase the limit based on my settings? Can these commits fix the reported leak? http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.0/rev/6299dfb73732 http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.0/rev/67f1cef07427 Please note that the auth service is restarted when it reach the limit so no real issues, please advice thanks Nicola

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[Dovecot] Removing specific entry in user/auth cache
by Angel L. Mateo 29 Jun '12

29 Jun '12

Hi, We have dovecot configured with auth cache. Is there any way to remove a specific entry (not all) from this cache? -- Angel L. Mateo Martínez Sección de Telemática Área de Tecnologías de la Información _o) y las Comunicaciones Aplicadas (ATICA) / \\ http://www.um.es/atica _(___V Tfo: 868887590 Fax: 868888337

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[Dovecot] Integrating Dovecot with Amazon Web Services
by Gary Mort 29 Jun '12

29 Jun '12

I did some searching in the mail archives and didn't see any discussion of integration with AWS, so I wanted to through out my thoughts/plans and see if it has been done before. I am setting up my own personal website on EC2 along with an email server, and I really don't like the idea of using the disk drive as permanent mail storage. EBS is too small instance storage is ephermeral. Looking over the docs, the dbox format seems most easily copied for my needs. http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/dbox To make life easy, I'll stick with just single-dbox as a start, however multi-dbox would be doable. With dbox, the only thing that I need to change is the alternate storage model: "An upshot of the way alternate storage works is that any given storage file (mailboxes/<folder>/dbox-Mails/u.* (sdbox) or storage/m.* (mdbox)) can only appear *either* in the primary storage area *or* the alternate storage area but not both — if the corresponding file appears in both areas then there is an inconsistency." First I want to add AWS S3 as a storage option for alternate storage. Then instead of the above model, the new model would be that email is always stored in alternate storage, and may be in primary storage. So, when mail comes in, I'd have Dovecot save the email to the alternate storage S3 bucket and update the indexs and other information[ideally, for convenience purposes, a few bits of relevant indexing information can be stored as metadata in the S3 object - sufficient so that instead of retrieving the entire S3 object, just the meta data can be pulled to build indexes. When a client attempts to retrieve an email message, Dovecot would check primary storage as it does now, if the message is not found than it will retrieve it from the alternate storage system AND store a copy in the primary storage. Primary storage can be periodically purged, have quota's to keep it from growing too large, etc. In this way, primary storage can be viewed as a message cache, just keeping the messages that are currently of interest, while S3 is the real data. [Ideally, this can be expanded so that when a message comes in, in addition to storing a copy in S3, an AWS SNS notification can be issued so if multiple IMAP servers are running, they can all subscribe to the same SNS channel and update themselves as needed]. This give me unlimited disk storage at S3 prices, I would even like to be able to set a few options based on the folder, so I can enable versioning on important message folders, use the even cheaper reduced redundancy storage for archives, and set expiration dates on email in the trash and spam folders so S3 will automatically purge the messages after a month. Secondly, I'd like to replace the Mysql database usage with a simpleDB database. While simpleDB lacks much of MySQL's sophistication, it doesn't seem that Dovecot is really using any of that, so simpleDB can be functionally equivalent. The primary purpose of using simpleDB is that this way the entire Dovecot system can be ephermeral. When a properly configured dovecot AMI is launched, it will start up, pull it's config data from an S3 bucket, subscribe to the SNS channel for new updates, and then start the Dovecot server. It won't care if it is the only Dovecot server, or if there are 500 other servers running. They all share the same simpleDB database. Whenever any change is made that is relevant to server configuration, a notice is generated to SNS, and all the email is stored in S3. As a starting point, I'm thinking the best place for me to start coding is the single-s3-dbox message store as it has the least moving parts[mainly just fix up the save function to run the way I need it to, and the retrieve function to make a local copy of any incoming email...additional metadata functionality can be added later]. Has anyone else been working on something similar? -Gary

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