[Dovecot] How to do SEARCH with doveadm

Alexander Chekalin achekalin at lazurit.com
Wed Nov 16 17:16:35 EET 2011


Hello,

I'm still playing with search messages from/to specified email address. 
In fact I need to do that to take such messages and copy it to another 
mailbox (so that box will contain 'Search results' and will be available 
to examine by any IMAP client). I've put my mailings in mdbox storage 
format, and use latest 2.1 beta version of Dovecot to be sure I use the 
freshest approach in search (and plan to use Solr FTS as well).

The setup is each, I use

passdb {
     driver = passwd-file
     args = /etc/dovecot/auth/%Lu
}

and

userdb {
     driver = static
     args = uid=dovecot gid=dovecot home=/MAIL/mail_storage/%Lu
}

and put user:password pair in file named after my mailbox in 
/etc/dovecot/auth/ (let's name it test at domain.com), and the messages are 
at /MAIL/mail_storage/test at domain.com/... While I use it from IMAP 
client it works nicely.

Ok, I put somewhat 5800 messages in INBOX, and IMAP pretty fast in 
working with it. But as I try to use doveadm to search for messages I 
need I simple lost my way (doing it under root):

# doveadm search ALL
doveadm(root): Error: chdir(/root/) failed: Permission denied 
(euid=104(dovecot) egid=106(dovecot) missing +x perm: /root, dir owned 
by 0:0 mode=0700)
doveadm(root): Error: chdir(/root) failed: Permission denied

Whatever cli command I try doveadv try to find messages in /root dispute 
it is at /MAIL/mail_storage/%Lu.

How can I make doveadv use right mail path? In fact, I don't want to use 
system users to work with mail, it'll be simple virtual mail user, so it 
is pointless to set up special system user to do that search.

I think I lost myself in general concept of how Dovecot handles users 
and credentials, so please please please push me in right direction!

Thank you,
   Alexander


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