- dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] Upgrade to new server question
by John Peacock 08 Mar '05

08 Mar '05

I'm vainly trying to get a new server ready to become the default mail server. We have a SAN, so I don't need to move the mailboxes (I can mount the same partition from both machines), but the question is what version of dovecot to load. I'm assuming that I cannot run both 0.99.14 and 1.00.x on the same maildirs (the indexes differ?). However, is it safe for me to mount the same maildirs from two different boxes? John -- John Peacock Director of Information Research and Technology Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4501 Forbes Boulevard Suite H Lanham, MD 20706 301-459-3366 x.5010 fax 301-429-5748

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[Dovecot] 1.0-test63 released
by Timo Sirainen 07 Mar '05

07 Mar '05

http://dovecot.org/test/ A new test release for a change. Fixed several problems with indexes, especially related to transaction log rotating (pretty easy to find bugs when you set them to be rotated every 5 seconds and keep bombing the same mailbox with 10 test clients). Please report both new and old bugs. The changes might have fixed lots of different randomly occuring problems. The most important bugfixes were also done to dovecot-stable. The tarball is already updated. Looking at changelog, there seems to be: - Don't crash if client disconnects in the middle of APPEND - LDAP and static passdbs can return "extra parameters" (http://wiki.dovecot.org/AuthSpecials) now. Only SQL did before. - Added "nice" extra parameter for userdb to set imap/pop3 process's priority - RPA/SQL passdb patches from Andrey - Major rearrangements (again) to auth code: - Blocking passdbs (SQL) now create auth worker processes to do the actual blocking work. auth_worker_max_count setting specifies the maximum number of these processes to create. PAM and checkpassword code should be fixed to use this method as well. - Fallback to using expired records from auth cache if database lookups fail. - multiple auth setting blocks still not working - Transaction logs are now rotated when they're over 128kB and created (not updated as before) more than 5 minutes ago. So with high traffic mailboxes the log file shouldn't grow forever anymore.. - other fixes and cleanups

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[Dovecot] Too many open files, etc.
by Martin Preen 07 Mar '05

07 Mar '05

Hello, a few days ago I switched out UW-server installation to dovecot 0.99.14 (Solaris 9). There were a few client issues, but mostly the migration was ok. But I have still some questions/problems: +) dovecot-auth: ... PAM: pipe() failed: Too many open files I increased the max. number of open files. Is this normal behaviour, that more than 512 open files are needed ? +) we're using mbox on NFS and index files on local disks. When building the index files for the first time, it takes (of course) a long time for large folders. But we have these users, and this will happen sometimes. Is there a way to improve performance ? +) in general dovecot saves a lot of NFS-bandwidth compared to UW-imap. Thats what I was looking for. But there also seems to be a problem with large inboxes (> 10 MB) and/or large attachments. Is this right ? One user currently gets this error from Pine when accessing a large attachment: MAIL FOLDER "INBOX" CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR. AFAIK this error is related to some timeout problem. Has anyone seen this (and a solution for it) ? Thanks. Martin ----------------------------------------------------------------- Martin Preen, Universitaet Freiburg, Institut fuer Informatik Georges-Koehler-Allee, Geb.52, Zi.00-006, 79110 Freiburg, Germany phone: ++49 761 203-8250 preen(a)informatik.uni-freiburg.de fax: ++49 761 203-8242 www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de

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[Dovecot] Can't create subfolders of my INBOX or delete folders with IMAP
by Matthew Exon 07 Mar '05

07 Mar '05

Hi, I've been using the dovecot IMAP server for about a year now, and basically it works. But there's an annoying problem, that I can't make any subfolders. I can only make folders that are at the same level as my INBOX folder. Worse, I can't delete folders once I've created them. I'm using Debian unstable on both the server machine and my client machine. The dovecot version is 0.99.13. For my mail client, I'm using Mozilla Thunderbird version 1.0. I've done a bit of investigation on my filesystem, and by googling for all kinds of stuff, but I'm really drawing a blank on this particular problem. Most of the general linux email documentation I've found either doesn't mention IMAP, or doesn't mention dovecot, or both. I can barely find any references to the concept of "subfolder" at all. I really don't want to know anything about email servers, I just want the bloody thing to work. Trying to figure out what the hell's going on is really frustrating! On the server, I seem to have various mailboxes distributed around the place. I've got a mail box in /var/spool/mail. I've got a file ~/mbox, which seems to be very old and is therefore probably a red herring. I've also got a directory ~/Mail with a bunch of files in, one for each of my folders. Having some of my mail in /var/spool, and some in my home directory, seems a really horrible way of arranging things, but anyway... Various online sources seem to suggest that maildir is better than mbox. I don't have any particular preference for one or the other, but I don't want to change if I don't have to because: 1) From experience, I don't screw with settings if I don't have to. Debian made it that way, and changing it behind Debian's back is a surefire way to cause trouble later. 2) Any other accounts on that machine (especially ones I might create in future) will probably still be mbox, causing even worse confusion later. 3) Porting mailboxes is always risky, and I don't want to lose my mail, or have incoming email dropped, or accidentally corrupt it, or anything like that. So I'm not going to do any of that unless I'm sure that it's actually going to fix the subfolder problem, and until now I haven't found any information anywhere to guarantee that that's the case. Intuitively I can guess that if a folder is just a big file full of concatenated email, then making a subfolder is going to be pretty much impossible, but I don't want to guess here. The actual symptoms in thunderbird are: When I select "New folder...", I get the "Create as a subfolder of:" dropdown hierarchy box thingy, but the "Inbox" option is greyed out (side complaint: no user interface should ever have a greyed out option without providing an explanation as to why it's not available, and what you should do if you want it to be available. Displaying it like that is just cruelly teasing the user). When I try to delete a folder, I get a dialog box saying "The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: Mailbox doesn't exist: <name of folder>". This is pretty frustrating, because I can *see* the damn thing in thunderbird. (another side complaint: "The current command"? You're *running* the bloody command, you should have a better description than that!) For some reason though, I can rename a folder with no problems. I went into /var/log/ on the server, to see what was in the Dovecot log file about the server errors above, but there *is* no log file, nor anything in the syslog. That can't be good. How do you tell the sysadmin when there's a problem? Does anyone have any suggestions for how I can fix this? And if possible, I want to fix this the Debian way, that is by modifying a debconf setting or a /etc/default file or something like that, so that when I upgrade Debian, or uninstall dovecot and then reinstall it, it'll be handled gracefully. Thanks, Matthew Exon

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[Dovecot] pop before smtp
by F. Even 07 Mar '05

07 Mar '05

I'm using the latest version of dovecot on my FreeBSD 4.x box with OpenPKG to keep other services up to date. Now...I'm able to get pbsmtp to allow relaying through postfix on this server using UW IMAP, but I would like to get dovecot working with relaying...but pbsmtp is not adding the ip when I uncomment the dovecot section after I authenticate. The log is below: [root@cerebus:/opt/sbin] ./pop-before-smtp --version version: 1.36 Mar 4 05:14:09 cerebus last message repeated 5 times Mar 4 05:19:46 cerebus dovecot: Killed with signal 15 Mar 4 05:20:00 cerebus dovecot: Dovecot v1.0-test62 starting up Mar 4 05:20:34 cerebus dovecot: imap-login: Login: user [ip.ad.dr.ess] Mar 4 05:30:21 cerebus dovecot: imap-login: Login: user [ip.ad.dr.ess] I had uncommented the stock pattern in the latest version to no avail: # For Dovecot POP3/IMAP #$pat = '^(... .. ..:..:..) \S+ (?:dovecot: )? (?:imap|pop3)-login: ' . # 'Login: \S+ \[(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)\]'; Thanks for any help anyone might be able to provide. Frank

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[Dovecot] No 'from' in messages
by Remy Zandwijk 06 Mar '05

06 Mar '05

Hi all, Over the weekend, we've migrated our old mail environment to Sendmail and Dovecot: - Dovecot 1.0 stable - Sendmail 8.13.3 - Procmail 3.22 Procmail is MDA for Sendmail and it delivers mail to Maildir boxes. Email clients like Eudora, Thunderbird, Outlook and mutt are working OK. When using Outlook Express and Pine however, in the message list the 'from' or 'sender' field is empty. This means users of these programs cannot see who did send the mail to them. When running Dovecot 0.99 in a early test period, this problem did not occur. Question: Did anyone see this behaviour before and how to fix it? Best regards, Remy Zandwijk

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[Dovecot] Dovecot 1.0-stable .deb file?
by Ian R. Justman 06 Mar '05

06 Mar '05

Hi, all. I know that there's no official Dovecot 1.0-stable .deb, given Timo's recommendations. However, does anyone have even an "unofficial" deb of it for, say, Sarge? I want to use 1.0's ability to use both mbox and maildir; the latter is very helpful for dealing with mailing lists. Thanks in advance for any help. --Ian.

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[Dovecot] Password scheme overides
by Andrew Hutchings 06 Mar '05

06 Mar '05

I notice in the wiki you can have password sceme overides (such as {PLAIN}password). Would this work with the password fields in SQL databases (as it isn't clear in the wiki or conf file)? Regards Andrew -- Andrew Hutchings Linux Guru Netserve Consultants Ltd. http://www.domaincity.co.uk/

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[Dovecot] dovecot-pgsql.conf can't find in chroot? (debian)
by Matthew J. Harmon 06 Mar '05

06 Mar '05

In my original email I noted that the directory /usr/local/etc was in the dovecot.conf variable valid_chroot_dirs : valid_chroot_dirs = /usr/local/etc:/etc:/var/mail:/lib Is that not sufficient? Under the /var/run/dovecot directory the directories ./usr/local/etc exist with dovecot-pgsql.conf in. Is there some big RTFM item I'm missing here? -Matthew P.S. - email address changed due to problems with upstream, will jump back as soon as this is fixed so I can finish my migration :) On Sat, 2005-03-05 at 09:06 +0100, Gunter Ohrner wrote: > Am Samstag, 5. März 2005 05:27 schrieb Matthew J. Harmon: > > I have dovecot (+ssl) configured on debian in a chroot with > ^^^^^^ > > I've never run dovecot chrooted, but... > > > The file exists, and permissions look good: > > root at alfa:~# ls -la /usr/local/etc/dovecot-pgsql.conf > > ...let me guess, you're not in the chroot here? > > So, how should dovecot be able to find this file while it runs chrooted? > You need to put all needed files into the chroot. > Yep, that's how it's with 0.99.x. With 1.0-tests however Dovecot opens > the dovecot-pgsql.conf before chrooting. --- Plagued with an error I can't get past: ==> dovecot_info.log <== dovecot: Mar 04 22:09:06 Info: Dovecot starting up ==> dovecot.log <== dovecot-auth: Mar 04 22:09:07 Fatal: Can't open configuration file /usr/local/etc/dovecot-pgsql.conf: No such file or directory dovecot: Mar 04 22:09:07 Error: child 18211 (auth) returned error 89 dovecot: Mar 04 22:09:07 Error: Auth process died too early - shutting down pop3-login: Mar 04 22:09:07 Fatal: fd_send(-1) failed: Broken pipe I have dovecot (+ssl) configured on debian in a chroot with postfix+pgsql+sasl. The file exists, and permissions look good: root at alfa:~# ls -la /usr/local/etc/dovecot-pgsql.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root dovecot 31 2005-03-04 20:35 /usr/local/etc/dovecot-pgsql.conf -> /etc/dovecot/dovecot-pgsql.conf root at alfa:~# ls -la /etc/dovecot/dovecot-pgsql.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 root dovecot 2875 2005-03-01 23:38 /etc/dovecot/dovecot-pgsql.conf But... dovecot-auth can't see it? That's weird... root at alfa:~# strace -vffF /etc/init.d/dovecot start 1>& ~/dovecot.strace root at alfa:~# less ~/dovecot.strace [...] :/chroot [...] :/dovecot-pgsql.conf [pid 18211] open("/var/log/dovecot_info.log", O_WRONLY|O_APPEND|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0666 <u nfinished ...> [pid 18213] fcntl64(5, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC <unfinished ...> [pid 18211] <... open resumed> ) = 5 [pid 18213] <... fcntl64 resumed> ) = 0 [pid 18211] fstat64(5, <unfinished ...> [pid 18209] <... fcntl64 resumed> ) = 0 [pid 18211] <... fstat64 resumed> {st_dev=makedev(22, 1), st_ino=917830, st_mode=S_IFREG|060 0, st_nlink=1, st_uid=0, st_gid=0, st_blksize=4096, st_blocks=16, st_size=4264, st_atime=200 5/03/04-22:09:07, st_mtime=2005/03/04-22:09:06, st_ctime=2005/03/04-22:09:06}) = 0 [pid 18211] old_mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0 x40019000 [pid 18211] fstat64(5, {st_dev=makedev(22, 1), st_ino=917830, st_mode=S_IFREG|0600, st_nlink =1, st_uid=0, st_gid=0, st_blksize=4096, st_blocks=16, st_size=4264, st_atime=2005/03/04-22: 09:07, st_mtime=2005/03/04-22:09:06, st_ctime=2005/03/04-22:09:06}) = 0 [pid 18211] _llseek(5, 4264, [4264], SEEK_SET) = 0 [pid 18211] fcntl64(5, F_GETFD) = 0 [pid 18211] fcntl64(5, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 [pid 18211] open("/dev/urandom", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 6 [pid 18211] fcntl64(6, F_GETFD) = 0 [pid 18211] fcntl64(6, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 [pid 18211] open("/etc/localtime", O_RDONLY) = 7 [pid 18211] fstat64(7, {st_dev=makedev(22, 1), st_ino=6193169, st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_nlin k=1, st_uid=0, st_gid=0, st_blksize=4096, st_blocks=8, st_size=1279, st_atime=2005/03/04-22: 09:07, st_mtime=2004/12/26-20:19:40, st_ctime=2005/02/09-03:35:52}) = 0 [pid 18211] old_mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0 x4001a000 [pid 18211] read(7, "TZif\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\5\0\0\0\5\0"..., 4096) = 127 9 [pid 18211] close(7) = 0 [pid 18211] munmap(0x4001a000, 4096) = 0 ** chrooting dovecot-auth [pid 18211] chroot("/var/run/dovecot-auth") = 0 [pid 18211] chdir("/") = 0 [pid 18211] gettimeofday({1109995747, 798541}, {360, 0}) = 0 [pid 18211] rt_sigaction(SIGHUP, {0x404a07a0, [], SA_RESTORER, 0x4027e678}, NULL, 8) = 0 [pid 18211] rt_sigaction(SIGINT, {0x404a07a0, [INT], SA_RESTORER|SA_RESTART, 0x4027e678}, {SIG_DFL}, 8) = 0 [pid 18211] rt_sigaction(SIGTERM, {0x404a07a0, [TERM], SA_RESTORER|SA_RESTART, 0x4027e678}, {SIG_DFL}, 8) = 0 [pid 18211] rt_sigaction(SIGPIPE, {SIG_IGN}, {SIG_IGN}, 8) = 0 *** lets look at dovecot-pgsql.conf! [pid 18211] open("/usr/local/etc/dovecot-pgsql.conf", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) [pid 18211] time(NULL) = 1109995747 [pid 18211] write(4, "dovecot-auth: Mar 04 22:09:07 Fa"..., 128) = 128 [pid 18211] munmap(0x40018000, 4096) = 0 [pid 18211] exit_group(89) = ? Process 18211 detached Excerpts from /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf: auth_userdb = pgsql /usr/local/etc/dovecot-pgsql.conf auth_passdb = pgsql /usr/local/etc/dovecot-pgsql.conf login_chroot = yes valid_chroot_dirs = /usr/local/etc:/etc:/var/mail:/lib auth_chroot = /var/run/dovecot-auth Any recommended next steps? Thanks a million! -Matthew

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[Dovecot] Still having problems deleting messages through IMAP
by Doug Eubanks 05 Mar '05

05 Mar '05

Hello, I am using SquirrelMail with the 1.0 releases, and I have even backed up to the latest stable release based on 1.0. I am using MailDirs. When I delete a message, the message still shows up in the message list until either I log out and back in or a new message arrives in that folder. Any ideas? Thanks Doug Eubanks doug(a)simflex.com The speed of time is one-second per second.

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