February 2020 - dovecot

How to backup maildir
by Robert Moskowitz 04 Sep '20

04 Sep '20

I have been thinking, and reading, on how to back up my mailserver. I have not found any approach that seems ready to use. I have run years without any backup, but would really like to have something in place. I figure I can attach a USB drive and backup to that, then from there rsync to something elsewhere. Further if that USB drive is a full mailserver image, I actually have a 'hot backup' where I only have to put the backup drive into a system and boot up at the last backup. But this means properly copying all of /home/vmail and probably /home/sieve plus the /var/lib/mysql Are there good tools that nicely does this? Or do I choose a time late at night (only I am sometimes in non-US timezones) to shut down all services and just use rsync? And stopping services itself is thought provoking. What if Dovecot, amavis, mysql, or whatelse is in the middle of writing out a mail file what happens to that file and restart. Just scary stuff and, in part, why I have never tackled this in the past. thanks for all feedback

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Rootless wiki page is not up to date?
by Marc Roos 20 Aug '20

20 Aug '20

If I run a docker image with the mesos containerizer and altering the dovecot config mentioned here[1] I think the root detection is incorrect because it looks like dovecot is still thinking it is root. I still get errors like: >> log(829825): Fatal: We couldn't drop root group privileges (wanted=10053(dovecot), gid=0(root), egid=0(root)) Why does it want to drop to root, if we are not even running as root? >> Error: service(ipc): chown(/var/dovecot/login/ipc-proxy, 91, 4294967295) failed: Operation not permitted Why does it want to chown, when it is not root? pop3-login: Fatal: setgid(101(dovenull)) failed with euid=10053(dovecot), gid=10053(dovecot), egid=10053(dovecot): Operation not permitted (This binary should probably be called with process group set to 101(dovenull) instead of 10053(dovecot)) [1] https://wiki.dovecot.org/HowTo/Rootless?action=edit&editor=text

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Can't move/delete folder "Renaming not supported across conflicting directory permissions"
by Johannes Rohr 12 Aug '20

12 Aug '20

Dear all, several users have reported that they were unable to move/delete folders using Thunderbird and they got the message "Renaming not supported across conflicting directory permissions". When I google for this message, I see hints like "your mail may not be all on the same volume", but here this is definitely not the case. All mail is in /var/mail/virtual and owned by mail:mail Curiously, when I tried the same operation in Roundcube, there was no error reported, so something about the combination of Thunderbird and Dovecot seems to be causing the error. Does anyone have advise on how I should go about tracking down the cause of the error? Thanks a lot in advance! Johannes

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imap doesn't like my passwd
by James 31 Jul '20

31 Jul '20

I spent days on this problem. I have dovecot setup to use SSL and IMAP. I also have a pop account that I had no trouble getting working. Both use PAM authentication on Linux. openssl s_client -connect localhost:993 a login test_user test_secure_password The response I got back was: a BAD Invalid characters in atom I changed the password to "abc" and it worked. The secure password used to work but it was a different architecture (x86_64 I think). The current architecture is armhf. It may be different versions of the software too. Dovecot v2.1.7

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JMAP support
by Martynas Bendorius 23 Jun '20

23 Jun '20

Hello, Is there any ETA set for JMAP support? Thank you! >> On 11/27/2016 5:28 AM, Aki Tuomi <aki.tuomi at dovecot.fi> wrote: >> Hi! >> We are working on including JMAP support to Dovecot. At this moment I cannot give any promise for exact version, but hopefully it will be part of v2.3 >> >> Aki Tuomi >> Dovecot Oy -- Best regards, Martynas Bendorius

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Dovecot Load balancing - Please Please Please help me
by Kishore Potnuru 24 Apr '20

24 Apr '20

I need your help on my issue very badly. I have the dovecot version 2.0.9 installed on RHEL linux 6.10 version. It's a single Live server. I need to add a load balancer by adding another server for resilience. I cannot upgrade the dovecot version at this time as it is a single live server. If something goes wrong, I will be in trouble. Basically the requirement/issue is: a) it's a single live dovecot POP3/IMAP server b) people are accessing their emails from microsoft outlook (by giving the same server name as IMAP and SMTP server). But more than 100000 emails will be travelled/routed. c) This server is not rebooted from couple of years. d) Now they are worried about, just in case if the server is having any issues during the reboot or if something goes wrong with the server in any case, there will be huge issues. e) They would like to create resilience by adding another server and emails will be travelled from both the servers. If one server is having any issues due to any technical issue and if it doesn't come back easily, then the emails will be travelled through the other server and there will no disturbance to the emails. atleast it travels from the other server. I have very less knowledge on this. Could you please help me providing the best solution for this. I will wait for your reply. Please please please help me. Thanks, Kishore Potnuru

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Warning: Failed to do incremental sync
by Laura Smith 08 Apr '20

08 Apr '20

Setup dovecot sync along the lines of (https://wiki2.dovecot.org/Replication). I am doing one way replication. The initial full replication happened without issue, but now I'm seeing these errors on the slave server: doveadm: Warning: /data/mail/foo/bar/Maildir/dovecot-uidlist: Duplicate file entry at line 26397: 1562173159.M215923P17350.mxp,S=2290,W=2339 (uid 143128 -> 143142) Warning: Failed to do incremental sync for mailbox Sent Messages, retry with a full sync (Modseq 1766 no longer in transaction log (highest=17617, last_common_uid=17559, nextuid=17560)) Warning: Failed to do incremental sync for mailbox INBOX, retry with a full sync (Modseq 2540 no longer in transaction log (highest=13870, last_common_uid=19912, nextuid=19913)) I guess dovecot automatically tries a full replication because eventually the messages get pushed and "sync failed" status changes from 'y' to '-'

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[Dovecot] Postfixadmin/MySQL/Dovecot 2 and quota
by Matt 01 Apr '20

01 Apr '20

Hi all, I'm setting up a new email server based on the softwares list below: * Postfix * Dovecot 2.0.9 * MySQL * Postfixadmin 2.3.6 My current problem is I'm unsure whether quota feature is well configured or not. In order to test and validate, I use Roundcubemail GUI which provides percentage of the space used by the mailbox (quota should be applied per mailbox). Here, my dovecot configuration: dovecot.conf: dict { quotadict = mysql:/etc/dovecot/dovecot-dict-quota.conf } dovecot-dict-quota.conf: connect = host=localhost dbname=postfix user=postfix password=postfix map { pattern = priv/quota/storage table = quota2 username_field = username value_field = bytes } map { pattern = priv/quota/messages table = quota2 username_field = username value_field = messages } dovecot-sql.conf.ext: driver = mysql connect = host=localhost dbname=postfix user=postfix password=postfix default_pass_scheme = PLAIN-MD5 password_query = SELECT username AS user, password, \ CONCAT('*:storage=', CAST(quota AS CHAR), 'b') AS quota_rule \ FROM mailbox WHERE username = '%u' AND active='1' user_query = SELECT maildir, 89 AS uid, 12 AS gid, \ concat('dict:storage=',floor(quota/1000),'::proxy::quotadict') AS quota, \ CONCAT('*:storage=', CAST(quota AS CHAR), 'b') AS quota_rule \ FROM mailbox WHERE username = '%u' AND active='1' conf.d/90-quota.conf: plugin { quota = dict:user::proxy::quotadict quota_rule2 = Trash:storage=+10%% } conf.d/20-imap.conf: protocol imap { mail_plugins = $mail_plugins imap_quota } When I check postfixadmin GUI, I can see that quota in realtime in quota2 table, no problem. But Roundcubemail cannot get this information and shows a unknown quota. If I add this line: quota_rule = *:storage=1G in conf.d/90-quota.conf file, it works, I mean roundcubemail gets and shows information (but not the one stored in db of course). I think I'm close to the right configuration but I need your help to complete this setup. Thank you in advance for your help. Best, Matt

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Namespace problem? duplicated folders...
by Gregory Sloop 30 Mar '20

30 Mar '20

I'm sure this is related to name-spaces, but for some reason [brain damage perhaps? :) ] I can't seem to figure out how to fix it. In TBird, for example, I have a folder tree that looks like this Inbox -| Folder-A Folder-B Folder-C Folder-A Folder-B Folder-C And Folder-A, Folder-B, Folder-C are the same folders, just shown twice. [In two different hierarchies.] I'm using mbox files to store mail. [If that matters.] Here's what I have in my conf files for namespace defs namespace { inbox = yes #hidden = yes prefix = INBOX/ separator = / } namespace inbox { mailbox Drafts { special_use = \Drafts } mailbox Junk { special_use = \Junk } mailbox Trash { special_use = \Trash } mailbox Sent { special_use = \Sent } mailbox "Sent Messages" { special_use = \Sent } } I've had this problem for literally years, and it's not been that big of a deal (mostly irritating) - and I've tried to "fix" it before without any success. But now it's causing some issues and I'd really like to get this nagging issue gone. Since it's been so long since I last tried to fix it, I really can't recall any of settings changes I made in an attempt to fix it. I'd guess this is a trivial issue, but if so, can someone point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance! -Greg

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encrypted storage on the fly using user's password without storing password on the server
by Alex Knowles 05 Mar '20

05 Mar '20

Hi all, I just joined the list. I've read through the mail-crypt plugin docs here https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/mail_crypt_plugin/ I'm still unclear (I'm not an expert) about the following: Is it possible to obtain on-the-fly encrypted storage using the user's password without the password being stored on the server? Basically a zero-knowledge solution. Theoretically this should be possible as the user provides the password when storing or retrieving emails. The above plugin docs don't make it clear for me whether it is supported. Could a kind clarify? I'd also be very grateful for a working conf as an example. Best wishes and thanks in advance, Alex.

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