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[Dovecot] Shared mailboxes and accessing MailDir not through IMAP
by Steffen Kaiser 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

Hello, I'm testing Dovecot that is part of Debian/sarge (v0.99.14-1). So far so good. I have migrated some mailboxes for testing with success and seems that everything works fine. One thing I do not figure out is, what to do about shared mailboxes, which are the very reason of searching for an alternative IMAP server, The Wiki states that there is some sort of shared mailboxes, based upon symlinks. Well, but since which version actually?? The Changelog stops at 2003-11-08 21:12 ? What I need is a mailbox (maildir) for a contact address (not a real shared mailbox, but several users shall be able to read a mail and delete it after processing). For this, one needs write permission to the mails therein only, the MDA takes care of to make the mails readable for the group. It would be good to see, if somebody had answered a mail already, but that's not required. What I tried is this: I setup all Unix-permissions of the folders (. cur new tmp: u=rwx,g=srwx) and their parents (u=rwx,g=x). Then I placed a symlink into the maildir of all users. Each user caches the INDEXes into an individual /var/ directory, not in the maildirs themselves. (BTW: I wonder why I need to give the group write permission to the base directory '.'). The mailbox shows up and is read-write. Now I wonder, what impact I'm to expect here? Esp. "The only problem is that currently everyone's message flags would be shared as well." (quote from a message of a thread taken from the Wiki) Then there is http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2003-March/001113.html the third item will apply to my situation, I guess. MailDir is (sort of) expected to be read by mutt directly, for instance. Because the mailboxes are located within the users home directories, some of them do this. Do this item mean that Dovecot is NOT expecting that mails are deleted in any other way than through itself? Otherwise Dovecot would find a change in the mailbox and rebuilt the index file regardless whether the change had been originated by another IMAP client or by directly manipulating the maildir. Bye, -- Steffen Kaiser

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[Dovecot] local users + virtual domains
by Micha Silver 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

I'm redesigning our mail server which holds several hundred mailboxes - most are local system users and some are virtual domains that we host. I understand that the 1.0x stable release allows for multiple auth mechinisms, so that I could use both PAM for local users and a passwd-file for the virtuals. If I want to stick with 0.99x can I mix and match in a single passwd-file the username/passwd for both local and virtual users? In dovecot.conf I'd have something like: default_mail_env = maildir:%h/Maildir auth-userdb = /etc/dovecot/passwd-file auth-passdb = /etc/dovecot/passwd-file then in passwd-file I'd enter: # local users localuser1:<passwd>:501:501::::: localuser2:<passwd>:502:502::::: ... #virtual domains virt1(a)example1.com:<passwd>:5001:5001::/var/vmail/%d/%u:/bin/false::INBOX=/var/vmail/%d/%u/Maildir postmaster(a)example1.com:<passwd>:5001:5001::/var/vmail/%d/%u:/bin/false::INBOX=/var/vmail/%d/%u/Maildir virt1(a)example2.com:<passwd>:5001:5001::/var/vmail/%d/%u:/bin/false::INBOX=/var/vmail/%d/%u/Maildir postmaster(a)example2.com:<passwd>:5001:5001::/var/vmail/%d/%u:/bin/false::INBOX=/var/vmail/%d/%u/Maildir ... Would this combination work? Thanks, Micha

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[Dovecot] dovecot stopping - no messages
by Nigel Allen 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

Greetings Running Fedora Core 3 and dovecot-0.99.13-3.FC3 as a production mail server for around 30+ accounts. A couple of times a day dovecot just stops. Nothing in the mail log except for Apr 26 00:48:19 sydsrv05 imap-login: Can't connect to auth process at default: Connection refused It's got to the point that I have put a script into cron.hourly to restart the dovecot service every hour. Any suggestions where to start looking please? Rgds Nigel -- Nigel Allen, Snr Consultant, ProSmart Consulting Australia 48 Tiarri Avenue, Terrey Hills, NSW 2084, Australia Tel: +61 2 9450 2690 Fax: +61 2 9450 2691 Mob: +61 4 1494 5269 http://www.prosmart.com.au

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Re: [Dovecot] docecot and procmail?
by Todd Burroughs 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Dan Stromberg wrote: > Is dovecot still considered unreliable when combined with NFS? I've been using the test releases and lately the current CVS release over NFS. We're using procmail to deliver mail and dovecot as the imap server. Imap access is sometimes through UW-imap on the same mailboxes. We keep the index files on the NFS server and are using mbox format. I am only running this on one server at this point, so you could see other problems if it is run on multiple servers. Procmail is run on several servers. We're probably testing around 50 mailboxes, some quite large. I haven't seen any corruption of the mboxes and some of them get hit pretty hard. >From my experience, I wouldn't call it "unreliable". I have this setting in the config: mmap_disable = yes I haven't tried using mmap yet... The server is Linux, kernel 2.6.x and the NFS server is a NetApp. Make sure that NFS locking is working. Todd

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[Dovecot] Problem with users home...
by websafe 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

Hi :) I hope this short example shows what problem I have: # returns users homedir from /etc/passwd grep user1 /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f6 # result: /home/group-subdir/user1 And the logfile... #maillog imap-login: Login: user1 [192.168.0.253] imap(user1): mkdir(/home/user1/Maildir/.Trash) failed: No such file or directory Why Dovecot tries to create /home/user1/Maildir/.Trash and NOT /home/group-subdir/user1/Maildir/.Trash as in /etc/passwd ??? Is there any solution? I'm running 0.99.14 # cat /etc/dovecot.conf ssl_disable = yes disable_plaintext_auth = no login = imap verbose_proctitle = yes default_mail_env = maildir:/home/%u/Maildir auth = default auth_mechanisms = plain auth_userdb = passwd /etc/passwd auth_passdb = shadow /etc/shadow auth_user = root Thanks in advance, -- websafe

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[Dovecot] Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 and Dovecot/IMAP problem.
by websafe 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

If you notice problems with your imap folders and "Lost transaction logfile" when connecting Dovecot (0.99 / 1.0-testXX) via IMAP, upgrade to Thunderbird 1.02. This should help. -- websafe

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[Dovecot] Track when user last checked mail
by Del Stoliker 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

First off I've just got to say thanks. We just upgraded from UW to Dovecot migrating from mbox to maildir. Wow, what a difference! Load average used to hang around 5.0 during business hours and could get up to 20+ on a bad day. Now we rarely break 1.0! I'm wondering if there's a way to keep track of the last time a user checked their email and whether they checked it using POP or IMAP. We're trying to gather statistics on what protocols our users use and find accounts that haven't been checked for a long time. We used to be able to do some of this with the finger command and the user's mbox. I found a script called "mfinger" that works better with Maildir, but it's designed for Courier. Any ideas? Thanks!

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[Dovecot] docecot and procmail?
by Dan Stromberg 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

Is dovecot still considered unreliable when combined with NFS? Is this true for mbox only, or Maildir as well? If dovecot Is still considered unreliable with NFS, how about having a dovecot mode that would chain into procmail for delivery, so that dovecot doesn't (necessarily) have to reinvent that wheel? Thanks!

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[Dovecot] Why is "UIDVALIDITY changed" fatal?
by Chris Wakelin 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

I've got several users testing Dovecot IMAP at the moment, but some of them are also accessing their mail via UW-IMAP at other times. (I've warned them about accessing the same folder simultaneously via UW-IMAP and Dovecot!) In addition, we have special folders "AutoSpam" and "Trash" that pruned using Washington's "mailutil" automatically every so often. Of course, Dovecot's indexes will become invalid in such cases, but they seem to get rebuilt automatically OK. However, in some cases UW-IMAP seems to change the UIDVALIDITY value (not sure why!) and when Dovecot tries to sync it notices this and gives up with a fatal error on opening that folder. Opening the folder a second time is then OK. I was wondering why Dovecot can't just rebuild the indexes silently in such cases (which seems to be done by returning "0" from the mbox_sync_loop() routine)? Best Wishes, Chris --+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+-- Christopher Wakelin, c.d.wakelin(a)reading.ac.uk IT Services Centre, The University of Reading, Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439 Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094

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[Dovecot] Basic configuration problem "not a directory"
by Einar Flesaker 26 Apr '05

26 Apr '05

Hi, I've been struggling with getting dovecot up and running the last hour, but I seem to be stuck. When logging in (which I can do successfully) my connection is dropped, and the following is outputted to my dovecot log: dovecot: Apr 26 09:56:52 Fatal: chdir(/bin/false) failed with uid 513: Not a directory dovecot: Apr 26 09:56:52 Error: child 27345 (imap) returned error 89 .. But I'm certain the relevant directories exist. Relevant configuration details are as follows: * [dovecot.conf] valid_chroot_dirs = /var/spool/vmail default_mail_env = maildir:/var/spool/vmail/$d/%n/ * [passwd sample] einar@domain.com::513:513:/var/spool/vmail/domain.com/:/bin/false:: * [directory listing] [root@server einar]# pwd /var/spool/vmail/domain.com/einar [root@server einar]# ls -l totalt 12 drwx------ 2 virtmail virtmail 4096 apr 26 07:27 cur drwx------ 2 virtmail virtmail 4096 apr 26 08:48 new drwx------ 2 virtmail virtmail 4096 apr 26 08:48 tmp I'd be very grateful for any assistance, any ideas of what might be wrong. Is there any easy way to see the relevant directory that /bin/false exits on? -Einar-

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