- dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] 1.0rc8 status report
by David Lee 12 Oct '06

12 Oct '06

A quick status report on how 1.0rc8 behaved in service for a few hours with several hundred simultaneous users, at a site very new to dovecot. Oh, and a question at the end. Summary: Reasonable for a first shot but one significant problem, requiring backing off. Background: We have a long-established UW-IMAP service for a user population of about 20,000 based on a few Linux (Redhat) machines running IMAP/POP and inbound delivery. We try to ensure, but cannot guarantee, that all activity for a given user takes place within one machine. Each machine mounts the INBOX area ("/var/spool/mail"; traditional UNIX mbox) via NFS with tight NFS arguments ("noac,actimeo=0", etc.) and similarly mounts the users' folder areas which are subdirs of their home directories. (We know that Mark Crispin recommends against NFS for UW-IMAP, but we seem to have been OK.) There is also some processing: .forward->"| procmail"->folder-or-inbox Each machine typically has several hundred simultaneous IMAP connections. This has basically worked well, but the UW-IMAP loading has been heavy. The plan: In an ideal world, I would like to restructure the above. But our world is not ideal, so we have to stay with the structure. But we are looking for a transparent (user perspective) migration to dovecot. The dovecot experience: Yesterday, I quietly adjusted a DNS entry to redirect one of the live email hostnames at an additional machine in the "farm", running dovecot 1.0rc8, including deliver/LDA (and taking into account some post-rc7 dovecot changes in this area). On an earlier, smaller-scale test, one problem had been some periods of "temporary authentication failures". Increasing "login_processes_count" and "login_max_processes_count" (each by a factor of 8) seems to have fixed this, and I'm not aware of any problems in that area yesterday. It basically went well. But just over two hours hours later I had to back off, because of a significant dovecot problem, namely that dovecot crashed, almost silently. The only traces of this event in the log file seem to be: Oct 10 16:26:12 [...] dovecot: child 24525 (login) returned error 89 Oct 10 16:26:14 [...] dovecot: Login process died too early - shutting down Any thoughts? Any fixes? If the problem needs debugging (or additional data/log collection) how might that be attempted in this environment? -- : David Lee I.T. Service : : Senior Systems Programmer Computer Centre : : Durham University : : http://www.dur.ac.uk/t.d.lee/ South Road : : Durham DH1 3LE : : Phone: +44 191 334 2752 U.K. :

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[Dovecot] Issues with Dovecot/Pam/nss_ldap
by Ejay Hire 12 Oct '06

12 Oct '06

Hello all. I have experienced an unusual behaviour from dovecot which I believe to be related to some interaction between dovecot and nss_ldap/Pam. Centos/Postfix/mbox(es)/Openldap/dovecot. The box is using PAM with ldap, and is also running BIND, SAMBA, and DHCPD. Dovecot 1.0rc2 from source. I left dovecot at the default, to use PAM for authentication and guess the mailbox. This worked well, except during peak times, dovecot would "hang", waiting an exceptionally long time after connecting before doing authentication. The users would report this as "Send/receive stuck on 64%" or something like that. During this time, I would note a number of <defunct> dovecot processes in ps. Increasing the number of idle login proceses in the pool to ridiculously high values (30) did not affect the symptom. Restarting dovecot would immediately resolve the issue. I believe this to be related somehow to dovecot's PAM interaction, because I was able to work around it by setting dovecot to talk directly to LDAP. Googling found isolated reports of similar behaviour in the Fedora Core 3 bug list at Redhat. It's rare I can help in project as important as dovecot, so I'm willing to spend some time tracking this down. What information can I provide to help? Thanks Ejay Hire

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[Dovecot] Fwd: Received dates problem in Outlook after migration
by James Wyper 12 Oct '06

12 Oct '06

Having looked at this again, I think I have a hypothesis: 1. Outlook is ignoring the date/timestamps on the files in my Maildirs 2. The file names of my transferred files follow a similar pattern (they start with near-identical numbers) 3. Dovecot's file naming scheme for mails must relate somehow to the date that they were created / transferred / received 4. If I can therefore **rename** the files correctly to reflect their sending date then I can fix my problem Does this make sense? Can anyone point me in the direction of a spec that says how Dovecot names its files? Thanks, James. --- James Wyper wrote: > Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 21:47:02 +0100 (BST) > From: James Wyper > To: dovecot(a)dovecot.org > Subject: [Dovecot] Received dates problem in Outlook after migration > > Hello everyone, > > I've just started using 1.0-beta3 on Ubuntu Dapper, having migrated > from an mbox / UW-IMAP combination to a Maildir / Dovecot one. For > some reason the mb2md tool failed to recognise some of my mbox files > as > valid ones, so I migrated my email by running UW-IMAP, copying my > folders to local storage in Evolution, then running Dovecot instead > and > copying the folders back. > > All seems OK, except that in Outlook 98 all the emails now have the > date/time of their migration, not when they were received. This > isn't > a problem in Thunderbird or Evolution - but my wife uses Outlook and > doesn't wish to switch. > > I've tried using touch to change the timestamps of the mails in my > inbox (in ~/Maildir/cur) but this hasn't had any effect. I've also > tried deleting ~/Maildir/dovecot.index and > ~/Maildir/dovecot.index.cache but this hasn't made any difference > either. > > Something else in dovecot must be being sent to Outlook as the date / > time on these emails. Can anyone suggest what it would be and how I > might go about changing it (to, for example, the Received: date on > the > email header?). > > Thanks in advance, > James. > > > > ___________________________________________________________ > Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. "The New Version is radically easier to > use" The Wall Street Journal > http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html > Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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[Dovecot] proxy mode and ldap
by Francis 12 Oct '06

12 Oct '06

Hello, I need to use dovecot as proxy pop and imap with ldap. in the documentation, there is an example to do this with mysql. how to do to return (as mysql do) nodelay=y nologin=y proxy=y an idea to do this with ldap ? Thanks in advance. Francis

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Re: [Dovecot] 1.0rc8 status report
by Bill Boebel 12 Oct '06

12 Oct '06

On Wed, October 11, 2006 11:26 am, Timo Sirainen <tss(a)iki.fi> said: > On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 15:54 +0100, David Lee wrote: >> It basically went well. But just over two hours hours later I had to back >> off, because of a significant dovecot problem, namely that dovecot >> crashed, almost silently. The only traces of this event in the log file >> seem to be: >> Oct 10 16:26:12 [...] dovecot: child 24525 (login) returned error 89 >> Oct 10 16:26:14 [...] dovecot: Login process died too early - shutting down > > Looks like this is happening to some people now.. Unfortunately I can't > really do anything with this little information. > I was seeing this too, with the CVS version just before RC8. I believe that when login_max_processes_count is reached (the default is 128) Dovecot is crashing rather than handling that condition semi gracefully. The reason I think this is because we have a cluster of servers that do search indexing for our IMAP mailboxes, and due to a bug this week, those servers started slamming one of our IMAP servers with rapid login failures. Dovecot crashed frequently with "Login process died too early - shutting down" while this was occurring. And then also under normal operation we were seeing Dovecot crash about once per day on random servers when that server was under a heavy IMAP load. To work around this we switched to "login_process_per_connection = no" and bumped up our file descritor limit ("ulimit -n"). No crashes since. But probably still needs to be fixed in the code. Bill

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[Dovecot] Strange Mysql connect problem
by Craig Jackson 11 Oct '06

11 Oct '06

Hi, I compiled Dovecot and Mysql on two different servers each with the same options. Dovecot connects successfully on Server B. Server A has this error in Dovecot trying to connect to Mysql: dovecot: auth-worker(default): mysql: Connect failed to /tmp/mysql.sock (exim_db): Access denied for user 'user'@'localhost' (using password: YES) - waiting for 5 seconds before Passwords are plain text. Server A (64 bit amd with Ubuntu Hoary) info: ./mysql -V mysql Ver 14.7 Distrib 4.1.11, for unknown-linux-gnu (x86_64) ldd dovecot libmysqlclient.so.14 => /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.14 (0x0000002a9566c000) libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x0000002a95881000) libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x0000002a95ac0000) libnsl.so.1 => /lib/libnsl.so.1 (0x0000002a95bf3000) libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x0000002a95d09000) libz.so.0 => /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libz.so.0 (0x0000002a95e90000) /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x0000002a95556000) libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x0000002a95fa4000) ./dovecot --version 1.0.rc7 More info -- The Mysql user name on A and B are the same and are correct. Other applications are connecting on A using the same credentials. Server B info (Debian PIII): mysql Ver 14.7 Distrib 4.1.21, for pc-linux-gnu (i686) using EditLine wrapper ldd dovecot linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000) libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x40020000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000) ./dovecot --version 1.0.rc7 I have Googled and see lots of people having the same problem. I would rather not downgrade Mysql. Why doesn't Dovecot connect on A? Thanks. Craig

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[Dovecot] POP +OK CR LF Question
by Phil Udel 11 Oct '06

11 Oct '06

HI. I just finished installing a new mail server running CentOS Ver 4. and I am running sendmail with devecot 0.99.11. Everything is working fine except for a customer of mine is using a tool that does pop requests. And his tool is failing waiting on a CR LF in the +OK. I did a small hex dump of my old pop and the dovecot pop and he is right. Docevot POP does not end its +OK with a CR LF. I looked around but I don't see where I can make that change. Can anyone please help. Thanks

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Re: [Dovecot] POP3 - Mark messages as read
by Jose Gervasio Gomiz 11 Oct '06

11 Oct '06

>>----- Original Message ----- >>From: "Timo Sirainen" <tss(a)iki.fi> >>To: "Jose Gervasio Gomiz" <goma(a)bblanca.com.ar> >>Cc: <dovecot(a)dovecot.org> >>Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 2:05 PM >>Subject: Re: [Dovecot] POP3 - Mark messages as read >>On Tue, 2006-10-10 at 12:28 -0300, Jose Gervasio Gomiz wrote: >> Hi all. I have a little problem with Dovecot. >> My POP3 users can retrieve their emails without problem, but if they have >> "Leave mail in server" (or similar) active in their clients, their mboxes >> doesn't get updated marking those messages as read. >>.. >> Should I upgrade to dovecot-1.x to solve this? >Yes. I've upgraded to dovecot-1.0-0_24.rc8, problem solved. Thanks for you help! Jose

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[Dovecot] Problems with LDA and vitual mailboxes
by Daniel Frickemeier 11 Oct '06

11 Oct '06

Hello, I try to set up dovecot LDA with virtual domains/mailboxes to use sieve. I use dovecot 1.0_rc7 with sieve dovecot-sieve-20060726 . All datas about the virtual domains and mailboxes are stored in a mysql-database. And without using the LDA delifer agent, everything works fine. But when I try to use LDA (even without sieve), I got a delivery failture. I followed the wiki-howto http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA to set up LDA support and added /etc/postfix/maser.cf: # Dovecot LDA dovecot unix - n n - - pipe flags=DRhu user=vmail:vmail argv=/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver -d ${recipient} /etc/postfix/main.cf: dovecot_destination_recipient_limit = 1 virtual_transport = dovecot for postfix. In dovecot.conf I added: auth default { # Space separated list of wanted authentication mechanisms: # plain login digest-md5 cram-md5 ntlm rpa apop anonymous gssapi mechanisms = plain login # SQL database passdb sql { # Path for SQL configuration file, see doc/dovecot-sql.conf for example args = /etc/dovecot/dovecot-sql.conf } # SQL database userdb sql { # Path for SQL configuration file, see doc/dovecot-sql.conf for example args = /etc/dovecot/dovecot-sql.conf } socket listen { master { path = /var/run/dovecot-auth-master # use this for LDA, the dovecot-auth will NOT work mode = 0600 user = virtual #group = mail # Or alternatively mode 0660 + LDA user in this group } client { path = /var/run/dovecot-auth # use this for postfix mode = 0600 user = posfix # postfix user #group = mail # Or alternatively mode 0660 + postfix user in this group } } } protocol lda { log_path = /var/tmp/dovecot-lda.log { And in dovecot-sql # Dataabase driver: mysql, pgsql driver = mysql # Currently supported schemes include PLAIN, PLAIN-MD5, DIGEST-MD5, and CRYPT. default_pass_scheme = CRYPT #default_pass_scheme = PLAIN-MD5 # Database options connect = host=localhost dbname=$DB user=$USER password=$PASSWD password_query = SELECT password FROM mailbox WHERE username = '%u' AND active = '1' user_query = SELECT maildir, 1002 AS uid, 1004 AS gid FROM mailbox WHERE username = '%u' AND active = '1' # eof But when I send a mail to a vitual user, I got the following log entries in mail.log: Oct 11 08:40:38 server postfix/pipe[11673]: D39A5664420: to=<zigulle(a)zigulle.de>, relay=dovecot, delay=0.08, delays=0.06/0/0/0.03, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure) and in /var/tmp/dovecot-lda.log: deliver(zigulle(a)zigulle.de): Error: userdb(zigulle(a)zigulle.de) didn't return a home directory has anyone here a hint, where the Problem ist? cu Daniel -- TELEKOM-Mitarbeiter, die keine TELEKOM-Aktien kaufen, sollten wegen Verwendung von Insider-Wissen bestraft werden. (Azkin Kaden)

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[Dovecot] RC8 - Creating maildir
by Luigi Rosa 11 Oct '06

11 Oct '06

I just setup a new mail server with maildir and Dovecot RC 8 I noticed that when I login via POP3 with a username that do not have a maildir yet Dovecot logs this line: Oct 11 11:46:52 gw dovecot: stat(/var/spool/mail/xxxx/) failed: No such file or directory After that Dovecot correctly creates the maildir structure Wouldn't it be better to log a message like "Creating maildir structure for user xxxxxx"? Ciao, luigi -- / +--[Luigi Rosa]-- \ I didn't know it was impossible when I did it.

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