- dovecot - dovecot.org

Re: [Dovecot] OT: best linux imap client for dovecot
by Frank Cusack 25 Feb '10

25 Feb '10

On 2/24/10 8:37 PM +0200 Timo Sirainen wrote: > 1) Online mode: Don't download all message headers at once at startup. > If I open a mailbox, I'm seeing only about 20 messages on screen. That's > all it needs to download. When I scroll the message list, download more > as needed. I disagree. You are conflating UI blocking with network blocking (download), probably because that's how TB does it. IMHO, when you open a mailbox, messages should fill in and be accessible immediately, ie as soon as the headers are downloaded. Beyond a screenful, the client should continue to download headers so that when you do scroll down, there is no delay. This is especially useful when you are on a slow link. You spend SO much time doing nothing, ie reading messages, while the client could be doing work for you, and then when you scroll you have to wait again? Also you have to adjust this behavior if server-side sorting is not available and the user wants something other than message order. If you're worried about "wasting" bandwidth, a valid concern, the client need only prefetch another screenful of messages at a time. If your client is configured to sync message bodies, it should go ahead and do that before you start actually reading them, so that you are not waiting on download. Apple Mail, for one, seems to implement things as I've described. Note I am in now way endorsing Apple Mail as a good IMAP client. -frank

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[Dovecot] antispam plugin
by Dan Swartzendruber 24 Feb '10

24 Feb '10

First off, I have to say I really like the antispam plugin. I am running a (relatively) new freebsd 8.0 server with postfix/dovecot/dspam/squirrelmail and it works great. Create a SPAM folder and tell the dovecot antispam plugin to use INBOX.SPAM as the spam folder and drag messages from INBOX to the spam folder and they are trained as spam. Here is the problem though: after training dspam for a couple of weeks, I had a couple hundred messages in the SPAM folder, so I selected them and hit the DELETE button and they were gone. Except they weren't. I had forgotten that by default squirrelmail moves deleted messages to a Trash folder under INBOX. So the messages were moved out of the SPAM folder, resulting in them being retrained as ham. Oops :( I then hit the purge link in squirrelmail and the messages were forever gone, so I couldn't rectify my gaffe. I have temporarily reconfigured squirrelmail to delete messages outright rather than save them in the Trash folder, but I don't like that as a long-term solution. What occurred to me is this: the current algorithm is: if message moves from * => SPAM, it is trained as spam, if it moves from SPAM => *, it is trained as ham. It would be nice if you could elaborate on that such that the ham rule was "if message moves from SPAM to X, it is ham" (and in my case, I would defined X as INBOX. Thoughts?

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[Dovecot] OT: best linux imap client for dovecot
by Axel Thimm 24 Feb '10

24 Feb '10

Hi, I'm a long term dovecot user, packager and believer, but on the other side of the wire I've been a mutt user for longer than I can think. Which modern email client under Linux is working best with dovecot? I just did a grep on User-Agent:/X-Mailer: on my dovecot archive (which goes back to 2004) and found that the top ten are: 28% Thunderbird 25% Evolution 9% Apple Mail 9% Mutt 5% Mozilla 3% KMail 2% Outlook 2% SquirrelMail 1% Alpine 1% Mulberry ... So it looks like most Linux people here like to use Thunderbird and Evolution. This is not a my-email-client-is-better-than-your-email-client thread, I just want to know which client(s) make proper use of imap features for fast searches/copies/deletions etc. Thanks! -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net

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[Dovecot] IMAP permissions?
by Larry Crouch 24 Feb '10

24 Feb '10

Hello, Can Dovecot allow some users access to IMAP functionality while forcing other users to use POP3 only? -- Larry Crouch Alpha-USA

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[Dovecot] namespaces/virtual folder & archiving
by fernando＠dfcom.com.br 24 Feb '10

24 Feb '10

Hi, I was following the earlier namespaces discussion and I would like to repost a doubt. I need to have some kind of archiving, it means, store old messages into a cheap storage. But I couldn´t think any other solution than symlinks. Then, I thought about store 'Sent Items' (as having old messages and less acessed). But I also needed to do with nfs and symlinks. So, it comes the namespaces discussion and a little brainstorm: 1) Could I have a namespace only with INBOX and the personal folders (drafts, sent items, etc) in another one - and those would be stored in huge sata disks while inbox in 300g sas disks ? 2) Could I maintain the prior configuration, but let the second namespace hidden and having the inbox subfolders (or any specific as sent items) as virtual folder ? I don´t know if this makes sense... 3) Could I have my normal Inbox and a folder (in another disk - ex. huge sata one) storing files older than 30 days and through virtual folders join these messages in a common virtual INBOX while acessing imap or pop3 ? What do you thing, would you have another better approach ? Best Regards, Fernando

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[Dovecot] Installation directories layout question
by Hunny Bunny 24 Feb '10

24 Feb '10

Hello folkz, I'm trying to compile and install Dovecot 1.2.10 from sources. When I execute: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/dovecot make make install I reasonably expect to find dovecot libraries in /usr/local/dovecot/lib but it puts them into /usr/local/dovecot/lib/dovecot. It add this extra 'dovecot' at the end of almost every installation path. Could somebody please clarify what extra configuration parameters should be set to make to change this strange dovecot installation directories layout. Thank you very much in advance, Alex

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[Dovecot] dovecot-2 new notify plugin
by Nikita Koshikov 24 Feb '10

24 Feb '10

Hello list, Can someone point me to documentation, if such available, about new dovecot notify plugin or describe here what it for and how to use it.

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[Dovecot] body search very slow since upgrade from 1.0.15 to 1.2.10
by Stan Hoeppner 24 Feb '10

24 Feb '10

Did you mislead me Timo? You said search in 1.1+ is faster than 1.0. I'm seeing approximately 20x *slower* search times in 1.2.10. Via Thunderbird, a full body search of my 11,000+ message IMAP folder hosted by 1.0.15 used to take less than 10 seconds. Since upgrading to 1.2.10 the search is taking over 3 minutes, the imap process servicing the client pegging one CPU at 100% for the duration of the search. Here's the mbox file: -rw------- 1 stan stan 50M Feb 23 07:41 1-Spam-l Doing the same search via grep results in a time of: real 0m0.361s user 0m0.204s sys 0m0.140s grep takes less than half a second, yet dovecot 1.2.10 takes 3 minutes for the same search? Actually grep is searching the entire file including headers, so it's doing more work than the imap process. Something is *SERIOUSLY* wrong here. Did I somehow nerfed something in dovecot.conf that's causing this? I deleted all the index files as per the upgrade instructions. However, checking the directories shows they're apparently rebuilt: [08:09:15][root@greer]/home/stan/mail/.imap/1-Spam-l$ la total 28M drwx------ 2 stan stan 4.0K Feb 23 07:41 . drwx------ 35 stan stan 4.0K Feb 15 11:14 .. -rw------- 1 stan stan 358K Feb 23 07:18 dovecot.index -rw------- 1 stan stan 27M Feb 23 07:41 dovecot.index.cache -rw------- 1 stan stan 616 Feb 23 07:41 dovecot.index.log What do I need to check/change/do to get these search times back down to reasonable/respectable levels, i.e. around 10s? Thanks. -- Stan

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[Dovecot] 1.2.10: namespaces and still no luck
by Toni Mueller 23 Feb '10

23 Feb '10

Hi, I'm trying to set Dovecot up in a way that is compatible with console usage of the same mailboxes (ie, w/o IMAP). My mailboxen are almost all maildirs (I can ignore all other formats), and are laid out as follows: INBOX = ~/Maildir All other folders are maildirs in ~/Mail Eg. ~/Mail/archive, ~/Mail/sent, ~/Mail/some-mailing-list I configured this, along the lines of http://wiki.dovecot.org/Namespaces: # I unset 'mail_location' namespace private { separator = '/' prefix = location = maildir:~/Maildir inbox = yes list = yes subscriptions = yes } namespace private { separator = / prefix = archives/ location = maildir:~/Mail hidden = no #subscriptions = yes inbox = no list = yes } which I thought should do it, but it doesn't. In TB (3, if it matters), I see: Inbox Trash archives Trash Inbox (shaded) directory (shaded) And that's about it. I don't see any of the pre-existing maildirs in ~/Mail. I also can't delete the two additional "Inbox" and "Trash" folders, and I can't subscribe to the second "Inbox", nor to "directory". I proceeded to create a new folder under "archives", which mostly ended up to be a new maildir + index files under ~/Mail, but it had a '.' in front of it. Also, the separator was automatically reset to '.' for the second namespace, as I found out when I renamed one of the directories from 'dir.1' to '.dir.1'. Am I still doing something wrong, or is this a bug or limitation in Dovecot, or in this version of it? Kind regards, --Toni++

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[Dovecot] Occasional problem with POP3-Download
by Andre Tann 23 Feb '10

23 Feb '10

Hello everyone, I have two mailservers [1] running dovecot. Mail store format is maildir. Every once in a while I have the following problem: When a User downloads his mail via POP3, the client says something like "the server has closed the connection unexpectedly, and gives this reason: [...blahblah...]". One can now cancel the download, and restart it, and the problem shows up again and again. The first few mails get downloaded, and then the process stops. Strange to say the "blahblah"-portion is a piece of text out of the email that doesn't want to get downloaded. Then I remove this single message out of the Maildir/cur-directory, and everything is fine again. It is easy to figure out which mail to delete because it's the first one that is not market as seen [...] filename...:2,S otherfilename...;2, <= this file must be deleted [...] For me it looks as if dovecot had a problem with some byte sequence in this mail, and for some reason it gives an error message to the client which is taken out of the mail. On the SuSE-Machine, before dovecot there was a courier-imapd running, which never showed this kind of problem, so it should not be a client problem. Hopefully my description is clear enough. Does anyone have an idea what's going on here? Thanks. Andre [1] One machine is a openSuSE 11.2 with # rpm -qa | grep dovecot dovecot12-backend-sqlite-1.2.9-0.1.1.i586 dovecot12-backend-mysql-1.2.9-0.1.1.i586 dovecot12-backend-pgsql-1.2.9-0.1.1.i586 dovecot12-1.2.9-0.1.1.i586 The other machine is a Debian Lenny with # dpkg -l | grep dovecot dovecot-common 1:1.0.15-2.3+lenny1 dovecot-imapd 1:1.0.15-2.3+lenny1 dovecot-pop3d 1:1.0.15-2.3+lenny1 -- Andre Tann

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