- dovecot - dovecot.org

Re: [Dovecot] How to run Dovecot as IMAP Proxy?
by V S Rao 22 May '09

22 May '09

Thanks for the many responses and views. I have taken RH support for my mail server only and so have to ensure they support me. So am going with their recommended version which is 0.99.x. Now on the webmail I have migrated to RHEL 5.3 and the dovecot being used there is 1.0.7.x. So that should support proxying, right? BTW, originally I did not go to Redhat. I moved from uw-imap to Dovecot 1.1.14 on the mail server for POP3. The problem of POP3 timeouts continued and I could not find any reason why POP3 was timing out when 400+ concurrent IMAP sessions were working fine. Moreover other network services such as SMTP, Telnet, SSH etc were working fine. Had the box installed behind a IPS box to see if there were any DoS attacks, but had to rule that out. As a last resort, paid RH for support and they made me downgrade Dovecot from 1.1.14 to 0.99.x. Surprisingly the moment I downgraded dovecot, the problem shifted to IMAP & remained ever since. So naturally they told me uw-imap was the problem and made me move to Dovecot 0.99.x for IMAP as well, but no improvement. But the surprising thing, as I mentioned in my original post, IMAP works fine on command line, with clients such as Outlook, THunderbird etc., but Webmail is very slow that its almost not available. BTW webmail was also running on RHEL 4.0. Seeing that the problem existed in webmail alone I upgraded webmail to RHEL 5.3 with all the latest RH supported packages on a new hardware. Any ideas to help me debug this issue would be of great help as I am stuck on this issue for almost a month now. Oh, btw regarding stats, I don't have a measure, but when webmail was working the login was well within 5 seconds. Now it takes forever (more than a min) or timeouts most of the time. Even after login, any request such as opening a mail or changing to a mail folder was well within 5 seconds. Now again it takes forever or timeouts most of the time. Thanks and Regards V S Rao ----- Original Message ----- From: "Timo Sirainen" <tss(a)iki.fi> To: "Dovecot Mailing List" <dovecot(a)dovecot.org> Sent: Friday, May 22, 2009 12:32:24 AM GMT +05:30 Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi Subject: Re: [Dovecot] How to run Dovecot as IMAP Proxy? On Thu, 2009-05-21 at 11:47 -0700, Seth Mattinen wrote: > Yes, that too. My point was not to judge Dovecot's performance based on > a 0.99 version. ;) I've successfully used several versions of dovecot > 1.1.x with imapproxyd and IMAP-only webmail clients. Do you have any numbers about how much faster it works with imapproxyd vs. without?

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Re: [Dovecot] How to run Dovecot as IMAP Proxy?
by V S Rao 21 May '09

21 May '09

Hi Timo, Thanks for the response. Apologize, but my responses are going to be a bit lengthy. > I have migrated from uw-imap to Dovecot for POP3 & IMAP service. I run > webmail using squirrelmail. When running uw-imap I used to run > up.imapproxyd on the webmail server for faster responses. After > migrating to Dovecot, I find that up.imapproxyd does not work well > with dovecot. > Why not? Here are my observations. I have around 6000+ mailboxes and roughly the same number of users. Earlier the mail server (running sendmail + uw-imap for POP3 & IMAP) would have around 80 pop3 connections (peak) and around 300 IMAP connections, concurrent. (ps -aef | grep imap | wc -l or ps -aef | grep pop3 | wc -l). There have been cases where I have observed upto 500 concurrent IMAP sessions. The IMAP connections are from a webmail server running Apache with Squirrelmail. The observation was that response was slow & so based on the suggestion on Squirrelmail for performance improvement we have installed up-imapproxyd on the squirrelmail machine. There was a significant improvement in the response times for the users, because of caching. After that I encountered some strange problems of POP3 timing out for users (earlier I did post that problem in this forum). I opened a ticket with Redhat and naturally they refused to support me with uw-imap running. So switched to Dovecot 0.99.x (I run the server on RHEL 4.0 and that is the max version supported by Redhat for that version). Ever since I did that POP3 works fine but now webmail is almost not available to the users. People usually get "connection dropped by IMAP server". However the IMAP server seems to work fine. Checked through manual "telnet <ip.address.of.mailserver> 143 & also through other client such as outlook & Thunderbird. I noticed that while the number of established connections for the webmail to mail server was shown as around 40 to 50 on the mail server, the same is shown as around 700 on webmail server. { netstat -an | grep :143 | grep ESTABLISHED | wc -l }. imapproxyd is configured to listen on port 9143 on the localhost and communicates to the mail server on std port 143. What was really bizzare is that when I check for the number of connections on port 9143 it shows around 8000! netstat -an | grep :9143 | grep ESTABLISHED | wc -l So I disabled the imapproxyd on the webmail & now at least the 50 connections are consistent. However the response is extremely slow and so was contemplating on the idea of trying out using another IMAP Proxy server and hence the question. > I don't understand Databases and don't want to install mysql etc for a > simple thing like IMAP PRoxy. > Do you just want it to proxy everyone to a single destination or to > different servers based on username? If you want everyone to the same > destination, why do you even want to use a proxy? I want to proxy all user to the same server. The idea being as explained above benefit from caching. > My question is can Dovecot be run as a IMAP PRoxy without the hassle > of setting up mysql etc? I use /etc/passwd for auth on the actual > dovecot server running IMAP & POP3. > Using checkpassword or SQLite would probably be the easiest solution. Or > generation of a passwd-file, but you'd have to keep it updated if users > change. If I used a passwd file on the webmail machine, running dovecot as a Proxy how would I configure dovecot on the webmail server? It has to accept connections from the squirrelmail and talk to the mailserver. I can do a rsync of the passwd file from the mail server to the webmail server using a small script whenever the file changes on the mail server. Of course the fundamental question from your response, I guess is, without a proxy why is the webmail slow? If proxy is not my problem, can you pls throw some light on why I am facing performance issues on my webmail alone? Thanks and Regards V S Rao

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[Dovecot] IMAP Get Savedate plugin
by Alaa Ibrahim 21 May '09

21 May '09

Hi, I want to add a feature to the fetch command in IMAP, by enabling it to return the save date, when I request the SAVEDATE parameter. I want to use this for my webmail application, so I can show the users the deleted date when they are viewing the Trash folder. I was able to put it directly into the code (patch attached), but I was wondering if there is a way to put it as a plugin instead. Can somebody guide me on how to do that. Thanks a lot. ------------------------- Play the best Flash Games on the web with Maktoob Shams Games. http://games.maktoob.com/

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[Dovecot] How to run Dovecot as IMAP Proxy?
by V S Rao 21 May '09

21 May '09

Hi All, I have migrated from uw-imap to Dovecot for POP3 & IMAP service. I run webmail using squirrelmail. When running uw-imap I used to run up.imapproxyd on the webmail server for faster responses. After migrating to Dovecot, I find that up.imapproxyd does not work well with dovecot. I tried to use dovecot as IMAP PRoxy server as per the document http://wiki.dovecot.org/PasswordDatabase/ExtraFields/Proxy I don't understand Databases and don't want to install mysql etc for a simple thing like IMAP PRoxy. My question is can Dovecot be run as a IMAP PRoxy without the hassle of setting up mysql etc? I use /etc/passwd for auth on the actual dovecot server running IMAP & POP3. Thanks V S Rao

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[Dovecot] crypt() failure is possible
by Arkadiusz Miskiewicz 21 May '09

21 May '09

dovecot 1.1.15 in src/auth/password-scheme.c contains: static bool crypt_verify(const char *plaintext, const char *user ATTR_UNUSED, const unsigned char *raw_password, size_t size) { const char *password; if (size == 0) { /* the default mycrypt() handler would return match */ return FALSE; } password = t_strndup(raw_password, size); return strcmp(mycrypt(plaintext, password), password) == 0; } but according to man page crypt() can fail and NULL is returned then. On other hand glibc info page is silent about such failure. The thing is that I'm seeing crypt() failure here with new glibc 2.10.1 built with nss backend for crypt(), so it would be good to handle such case. (crypt failure was due to improper nss packaging but it could also happen if somehow nss file becomes corrupted) -- Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz PLD/Linux Team arekm / maven.pl http://ftp.pld-linux.org/

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Re: [Dovecot] Authenticating with /etc/passwd
by June Qiu 21 May '09

21 May '09

it is as displayed --- On Thu, 5/21/09, Charles Marcus <CMarcus(a)Media-Brokers.com> wrote: > From: Charles Marcus <CMarcus(a)Media-Brokers.com> > Subject: Re: [Dovecot] Authenticating with /etc/passwd > To: "June Qiu" <qljune(a)yahoo.com> > Cc: dovecot(a)dovecot.org > Date: Thursday, May 21, 2009, 6:39 PM > On 5/20/2009, June Qiu (qljune(a)yahoo.com) > wrote: > > dovecot -n: > > > > Warning: fd limit 256 is lower than what Dovecot can > use under full load (more than 768). Either grow the limit > or change login_max_processes_count and max_mail_processes > settings > > # OS: SunOS 5.10 sun4u > > info_log_path: /var/log/dovecot.log > > Is the missing version line a copy/paste error? Or did the > warning > obscure it somehow? > > > -- > > Best regards, > > Charles >

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[Dovecot] Authenticating with /etc/passwd
by June Qiu 21 May '09

21 May '09

I am trying to do authentication with /etc/passwd and something is not working right for me. Pls help! When i try to authenticate via pop3, I get: -ERR Authentication failed. In the logs, I get: May 21 11:14:07 Info: auth(default): client in: AUTH 1 PLAIN service=pop3 secured lip=127.0.0.1 rip=127.0.0.1 lport=110 rport=32774 resp=AGp1bmUAU0lORzNlcnQ= May 21 11:14:07 Info: auth(default): passwd(test1,127.0.0.1): lookup May 21 11:14:07 Info: auth(default): passwd(test1,127.0.0.1): Password mismatch May 21 11:14:07 Info: auth(default): passwd(test1,127.0.0.1): CRYPT(password) != 'x' May 21 11:14:09 Info: auth(default): client out: FAIL 1 user=test1 May 21 11:14:17 Info: pop3-login: Disconnected (auth failed, 1 attempts): user=<test1>, method=PLAIN, rip=127.0.0.1, lip=127.0.0.1, secured dovecot -n: Warning: fd limit 256 is lower than what Dovecot can use under full load (more than 768). Either grow the limit or change login_max_processes_count and max_mail_processes settings # OS: SunOS 5.10 sun4u info_log_path: /var/log/dovecot.log protocols: imap pop3 listen(default): 127.0.0.1:143 listen(imap): 127.0.0.1:143 listen(pop3): * ssl_disable: yes disable_plaintext_auth: no login_dir: /usr/local/var/run/dovecot/login login_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login login_greeting: IMAP ready. login_processes_count: 2 mail_debug: yes mail_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3 mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/pop3 namespace: type: private separator: . prefix: INBOX. inbox: yes list: yes subscriptions: yes auth default: verbose: yes debug: yes debug_passwords: yes passdb: driver: passwd userdb: driver: passwd args: blocking=yes

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[Dovecot] mkdir no permission
by Anna Obertacke 21 May '09

21 May '09

Hallo list-member, Please ignore my bad english. I cant wright bad but i understand well. I reinstalled my server and have big problems with (V 1.1.11) dovecot now. I work with Ubuntu 9.04 Server and want to use pop and imap with easy configuration. I fetch all my Mails on the server and want to look them up by apple Mail. Until yesterday dovecot only worked after I logged in and did something on the server, for example call "mail" oder call "mail.log". After reinstall yesterday it works no more. The new entry in log is "Internal error". Anything else was before yesterday also. My Error Logs: mail.log: May 19 10:00:38 ubuntu dovecot: POP3(annalein): mkdir(/home/annalein/Maildir/cur) failed: Permission denied (euid=1000(annalein) egid=1000(annalein) missing +w perm: /home/ annalein) May 19 10:00:38 ubuntu dovecot: POP3(annalein): Couldn't open INBOX: Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information. [2009-05-19 10:00:38] May 19 10:00:38 ubuntu dovecot: POP3(annalein): Couldn't open INBOX top=0/0, retr=0/0, del=0/0, size=0 May 19 10:00:43 ubuntu dovecot: IMAP(annalein): mkdir(/home/annalein/Maildir/cur) failed: Permission denied (euid=1000(annalein) egid=1000(annalein) missing +w perm: /home/ annalein) syslog: May 19 10:22:34 ubuntu dovecot-auth: pam_sm_authenticate: Called May 19 10:22:34 ubuntu dovecot-auth: pam_sm_authenticate: username = [annalein] May 19 10:22:34 ubuntu dovecot-auth: Warning: Using default salt value (undefined in ~/.ecryptfsrc) May 19 10:22:36 ubuntu dovecot-auth: Passphrase key already in keyring; rc = [1] May 19 10:22:36 ubuntu dovecot-auth: ecryptfs_add_passphrase_key_to_keyring: Error adding auth tok with sig [e54db404244691b7] to the keyring; rc = [1] May 19 10:22:36 ubuntu dovecot-auth: Error attempting to add filename encryption key to user session keyring; rc = [1] May 19 10:22:36 ubuntu dovecot-auth: Passphrase key already in keyring; rc = [1] May 19 10:22:36 ubuntu dovecot-auth: ecryptfs_add_passphrase_key_to_keyring: Error adding auth tok with sig [d7f23dd0d7e04b51] to the keyring; rc = [1] May 19 10:22:36 ubuntu dovecot-auth: Error attempting to add passphrase key to user session keyring; rc = [1] May 19 10:22:36 ubuntu dovecot-auth: There is already a key in the user session keyring for the given passphrase. My configuration ist in dovecot-postfix.conf. I can't call it by dovecot -n. But i changed allmost nothing from default- disable_plaintext_auth=no Some points in the file: protocols = imap pop3 imaps pop3s managesieve mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir Please tell what i should show you. Thank you for help. Greetings, Anna Obertacke.

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Re: [Dovecot] Migration questions...
by Richard Hobbs 21 May '09

21 May '09

Hello again, people, I have been reading all of the emails sent back and forth recently, and reading many web pages, and I have a new draft of my migration plan. If anyone has the time and generosity to read through this latest plan for me and let me know if you spot any potential problems with it, i'd really appreciate it. FYI, we're moving from a Debian 3.1/exim/uw-imapd/qpopper/mbox setup to a Debian 5.0/exim/dovecot/maildir setup, and the final version of this document can hopefully become a useful guide for lots of people in future too, if I get it right :-) Anyway... here's the plan... 1. Install Debian with exim, spamassassin, mysqld (for Horde/IMP) and mailman. Use ReiserFS for the indexes and data. XFS would be second choice for filesystem, and this is something of a religious argument, but Dovecot's own page states that ReiserFS is a better choice, and loads of pages on the Internet say that one or the other is better - there's no clear winner, really, so ReiserFS (the FS we already know and trust) wins the battle. 2. Run an online update. 3. Setup IPMI and monitor it from Nagios. 4. Install HotSaNIC to monitor historical system stats. 5. Install and configure Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (or whatever it's called) to monitor hardware, and make sure we will be emailed if a hard drive fails. 6. Rsync homedirs and inboxes onto new server, ready for initial exim configuration. 7. Configure exim as per existing mail server and test that mailing lists and normal email works. You should now have the existing mail delivery solution on the brand new hardware. 8. Configure Spamassassin as per current configuration and test. 9. Configure mailman as per current configuration and test. 10. Once mail delivery is sorted, add "deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free" into "/etc/apt/sources.list" and run "aptitude update && aptitude install debian-backports-keyring && aptitude update". 11. Install dovecot (at the time of writing, this was version 1.1.13-2). 12. Run the conversion utility (use "mb2md.py" from http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/MailFormat because "convert-tool" doesn't preserve msg UIDs) to convert all existing "mbox" mailboxes into "maildir" mailboxes, for use with Dovecot. 13. Setup exim to use Dovecot's delivery agent ("deliver") so the indexes are updated on mail delivery instead of when the mailbox is requested and also to use the new maildir format. 14. Setup dovecot for IMAP and POP3 and test. *****THIS IS WHERE THE REPEATABLE SECTION BEGINS***** 15. Stop exim and dovecot services. 16. Rsync homedirs and inboxes onto new server again. 17. Run the conversion utility (use "mb2md.py" from http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/MailFormat because "convert-tool" doesn't preserve msg UIDs) to convert all existing "mbox" mailboxes into "maildir" mailboxes. 18. Start exim and dovecot services and test SMTP, Spamassassin, mailman, IMAP and POP3. *****THIS IS WHERE THE REPEATABLE SECTION ENDS***** 19. Once everything is working perfectly, send an email to the entire company instructing them what to do after the outage and arrange an outage and do the following steps as soon as the outage begins: a. Unplug DMZ switch from firewall to make delivered mail wait at the sender. b. Stop exim, IMAP, POP3 and dovecot services on both mail servers. c. Rsync homedirs and inboxes onto new server again. d. Run the conversion utility (use "mb2md.py" from http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/MailFormat because "convert-tool" doesn't preserve msg UIDs) to convert all existing "mbox" mailboxes into "maildir" mailboxes. e. Start exim and dovecot services and test SMTP, Spamassassin, mailman, IMAP and POP3. f. Reconfigure my own mail client to point to the new mail server (192.168.2.3). g. Reconfigure firewall to think the mail server is now on 192.168.2.3 instead of 192.168.2.2. h. Prepare an email in webmail somewhere in the world, ready to send to a user on our mail server. i. Plug DMZ switch back into firewall and begin monitoring exim logs to check that mail is being delivered. j. Send the email from webmail and check that is goes through exim perfectly and is sitting in the users Inbox. NOTE: We now have a working mail delivery solution! k. Start dovecot IMAP and POP3 and test both. l. Once exim and dovecot are both working against live mailboxes, tell everyone the outage is over. 20. Install and configure Horde & IMP to access email via IMAP. 21. Reconfigure backup script to make sure new server is backed up. 22. Modify Nagios config to monitor new server. 23. DONE! Thanks in advance, everyone! :-) Richard. Brandon Lamb wrote: > On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 5:02 AM, Richard Hobbs > <richard.hobbs(a)crl.toshiba.co.uk> wrote: >> Seth Mattinen wrote: >>> Richard Hobbs wrote: >>>> Seth Mattinen wrote: >>>>> Phillip Macey wrote: >>>>>> On 14/05/2009 5:11 PM, Steffen Kaiser wrote: >>>>>>> On Wed, 13 May 2009, Richard Hobbs wrote: >>>>>>>> The main complaint we have from users is that their IMAP Inbox, with >>>>>>>> 5000 emails in it takes ages to appear, and no amount of coaxing will >>>>>>>> convince them to split their inbox into multiple folders. >>>>>>> Oh, we serve Maildir via Dovecot IMAP and 5000 messages per folder are >>>>>>> a wimp. Problems start if the user: >>>>>> We are having some performancec issues on our server at the moment - all >>>>>> I can put it down to is the large size of some maildirs. Eg. `ls -ld >>>>>> Maildir/cur` might show a directory >20Mb in size for some of our users >>>>>> (20-30k emails). >>>>>> (Performance issues == everything is running ok then all of a sudden >>>>>> load avg goes through the roof, system cpu time goes crazy. Reading mail >>>>>> grinds to a halt. Then everything recovers just as suddenly and the load >>>>>> avg gradually returns to normal levels) >>>>> Are you using ext3 by chance? Vanilla ext3 without directory indexing >>>>> (or whatever it's called) *hates* directories with a lot of files - like >>>>> maildir. Personally, I use XFS, which doesn't suffer from this problem >>>>> since it uses b-trees instead of a table(!) like ext3 does. >>>> This raises another question for me actually... >>>> >>>> We will have one volume for indexes and another volume for data (using >>>> maildir). We will be using the latest stable Debian Linux distro. >>>> >>>> Any opinions on the best filesystem to use? We would normally go >>>> ReiserFS for large volumes, and ext3 for small volumes because of the >>>> unlimited inodes in reiserfs, but i understand that support for that is >>>> beginning to disappear given that Hans Reiser got into a bit of trouble >>>> a few years ago. >>>> >>>> Anyway... that would leave ext3, but is there a better choice i could >>>> make in this instance? We do want performance, of course, but also >>>> complete reliability and resilience when it comes to system crashes >>>> etc... we do *not* want data corruption, and ext3 we know has a very >>>> good journalling and data recovery methods. Well... they're very mature, >>>> anyway. >>>> >>> I used to use ext3, ran into its horrible performance even with >>> directory indexing enabled, went to XFS and never looked back. All of my >>> systems are Debian stable. Reiser3 is part of the kernel so I wouldn't >>> worry about that; Namesys considered it complete and stopped work on it >>> long before the whole murder thing. Both Reiser3 and XFS have worse >>> reputations than ext3, however, I've seen ext3 filesystems hosed beyond >>> repair, too. All my XFS filesystems have battery-backed cache >>> controllers, so it hasn't happened to me yet, hopefully never. ;) One >>> catch with XFS (such as with LVM) to keep in mind is you can't ever >>> shrink it, only grow. >> Trouble is... i've been googling this as well, just now, and loads of >> people say XFS has the better performance, but loads of other people say >> ReiserFS has the better performance. >> >> We have battery backed up RAID controllers too, in this new system, and >> the systems are UPSd, so on that basis i'm still none the wiser! lol >> >> I appreciate your experience with XFS is a positive one, but even the >> dovecot web site says XFS might now be a good choice... >> >> http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir >> >> What a tough decision! I know it probably won't make too much difference >> in my situation, but i want this to be a very long-term solution, so >> want to do it right first time! >> >> Any other opinions on XFS vs Reiserfs with Dovecot maildir? >> >> Thanks again! >> >> Richard. >> >> >>> ext3 is mature but IMHO completely unsuitable for a busy mail server or >>> any situation where you'll have a bajillion of files in one directory. >>> The exact point at which ext3 will screw you over obviously depends on >>> many factors. But when it happens it'll probably be painful to reformat >>> to something better. >>> >>> ~Seth >>> >>> ______________________________________________________________________ >>> This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. >>> For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email >>> ______________________________________________________________________ >>> >>> >> -- >> Richard Hobbs (IT Specialist) >> Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. - Cambridge Research Laboratory >> Email: richard.hobbs(a)crl.toshiba.co.uk >> Web: http://www.toshiba-europe.com/research/ >> Tel: +44 1223 436999 Mobile: +44 7811 803377 > > We have been using XFS on our raids for the last few years. We have > fairly new hardware, and using maildir. Delivering over nfs using > exim+dovecot deliver. pop3/imap is near instant load on our webmail. > We have about 16,000 email accounts with ~175 imap+pop3 connections > open all the time. 20 drive sata2 raid 10. amd quad core 9850 with 8 > gigs ram. load sits about 0.30 - 0.45 all day/night. Last I checked > backups were 30-45 minutes, 413 gigs. 6,403,942 files. > > ______________________________________________________________________ > This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. > For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email > ______________________________________________________________________ > > -- Richard Hobbs (IT Specialist) Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. - Cambridge Research Laboratory Email: richard.hobbs(a)crl.toshiba.co.uk Web: http://www.toshiba-europe.com/research/ Tel: +44 1223 436999 Mobile: +44 7811 803377

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Re: [Dovecot] pop3 gives a permission denied error on chdir
by Kenneth Gonsalves 21 May '09

21 May '09

On Wednesday 20 May 2009 01:20:37 you wrote: > On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 13:35 +0530, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote: > > May 19 09:16:10 greenchilly dovecot: chdir(/home/vmail/example.com/john) > > failed with uid 5000: Permission denied > > .. > > > I have looked at the archives and see that the problem has been reported > > before, but cannot find any solution. Dovecot as LDA has no problem > > accessing and writing mails to the directory as UID 5000. I suspect that > > it is trying to access some other directory and the error message is > > misleading. The directory /home/vmail/example.com/john is owned by user > > vmail with UID 5000. Any clues? > > And all the directories before that are also available for that user? yes > Are you using NFS? Are you using SELinux or something? no > Anyway that > chdir() syscall really failed with that error message. The reason for > that is less clear then.. v1.1+ would give a much nicer error message > here telling exactly what is wrong.. I have installed version 1.1.13, here is the mail log: May 20 10:33:54 greenchilly dovecot: auth(default): new auth connection: pid=1181 May 20 10:34:07 greenchilly dovecot: auth(default): client in: AUTH^I1^IPLAIN^Iservice=pop3^Isecured^Ilip=127.0.0.1^Irip=127.0.0.1^Ilport=110^Irport=42418^Iresp=<hidden> May 20 10:34:07 greenchilly dovecot: auth-worker(default): pam(john(a)example.com,127.0.0.1): lookup service=dovecot May 20 10:34:07 greenchilly dovecot: auth-worker(default): pam(john(a)example.com,127.0.0.1): #1/1 style=1 msg=Password: May 20 10:34:10 greenchilly dovecot: auth-worker(default): pam(john(a)example.com,127.0.0.1): unknown user May 20 10:34:10 greenchilly dovecot: auth(default): sql(john(a)example.com,127.0.0.1): query: SELECT email as user, passwd as password FROM view_users WHERE email='john(a)example.com'; May 20 10:34:10 greenchilly dovecot: auth(default): client out: OK^I1^Iuser=john(a)example.com May 20 10:34:10 greenchilly dovecot: auth(default): master in: REQUEST^I3^I1166^I1 May 20 10:34:10 greenchilly dovecot: auth(default): passwd(john(a)example.com,127.0.0.1): lookup May 20 10:34:10 greenchilly dovecot: auth(default): passwd(john(a)example.com,127.0.0.1): unknown user May 20 10:34:10 greenchilly dovecot: auth(default): master out: USER^I3^Ijohn@example.com^Iuid=5000^Igid=5000^Ihome=/home/vmail/example.com/john May 20 10:34:10 greenchilly dovecot: Fatal: chdir(/home/vmail/example.com/john) failed with uid 5000: Permission denied May 20 10:34:10 greenchilly dovecot: child 1182 (pop3) returned error 89 (Fatal failure) May 20 10:34:10 greenchilly dovecot: pop3-login: Login: user=<john(a)example.com>, method=PLAIN, rip=127.0.0.1, lip=127.0.0.1, secured and here is the session info: lawgon@greenchilly:~$ telnet localhost pop3 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost.localdomain. Escape character is '^]'. +OK Dovecot ready. user john(a)example.com +OK pass summersun +OK Logged in. Connection closed by foreign host. -- regards Kenneth Gonsalves Associate NRC-FOSS http://nrcfosshelpline.in/web/

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