[Dovecot] Re: docecot and procmail?

[Dan Stromberg]

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 23:04:06 +0100, Andrew Hutchings wrote:

> On Tuesday 26 April 2005 22:44, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> On Tue, 2005-04-26 at 14:13 -0700, Dan Stromberg wrote:
>> > 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?
>>
>> I'm not sure what Procmail has to do with NFS unreliability. You can use
>> Procmail to store the incoming messages, but the problems come when
>> mailbox is actually being accessed with IMAP/POP3.
>>
>> The problem isn't in either mbox or maildir, it's Dovecot's index files.
>> It's of course possible to store indexes to local disk, but if you're
>> using multiple servers you'll get worse performance whenever latest
>> indexes can't be used.
>>
>> Recent 1.0-tests should be somewhat usable with NFS too. I think someone
>> in this list already is using it.
> 
> Yep we are, NFS server with 2x dovecot servers, mailboxes are Maildir and 
> indexes are stored on local HDDs.  Using Mysql master-slaves for user/pass.  
> Very reliable system, only real problem we had was when the NFS HDD failed.  
> We now have a redundancy for that too :)
> Timo has done some great work to get this kinda thing working.
> 
> Regards
> Andrew

I'm happy to hear that this is only an index issue.

I guess what I meant to point out is, that procmail claims to be very NFS
safe, and last time I built it, it had some sort of procedure for
determining a safe way of operating over NFS for the system it was being
built on.

procmail's "lockfile" program, or the NFS-safe logic within it, might be
useable in dovecot....