[Dovecot] My old email is not stored

[Charles Marcus]

On 2013-04-11 5:00 AM, HylkeB <hylke at movinsoftware.nl> wrote:
> I see now, took some time for me to sink in. Is there any way on the server
> to disable the pop3 protocol, so all email users cant accidently use pop3
> and delete all their old emails?
>
> I suppose i would have to do something like the following on the server:
>   - open dovecot.conf
>   - change the first line (currently its protocols = imap imaps pop3 pop3s),
> and remove pop3 and pop3s
>   - maybe delete/change something in this piece of code in dovecot.conf:
> protocol pop3 {
>      pop3_uidl_format = %08Xu%08Xv
> }
>   - restart dovecot (and maybe some other applications?)
>
> So is this the right way to disable the pop3 protocol in my mail server? I
> dont want to crash the mail server by disabling pop3.

Yes, although I'm pretty sure you don't need to comment out the 
'protocol pop3... section stuff as long as you disable the protocol 
itself (protocols = ...'). What other apps would you have to restart? 
Dovecot is the mail server.

Before you do this, I'd inform/warn everyone, provide instructions for 
setting up their account as IMAP and wait until they have all done so, 
then tell them they can manually copy their email back to the server via 
their new IMAP account. This (waiting on everyone to confirm they have 
changed over) may not be practical though, depending on how many users 
you have.

And you won't crash the server, but anyone still trying to connect using 
POP will start complaining loudly... ;)

> And about me being the admin of the mailserver, thanks to you guys im going
> to search for a company that can maintain the server stuff for me (hiring
> someone is too expensive for now), for they have more experience in servers
> and know what to do.

I would strongly recommend Timo's new company. His rates are very 
reasonable, and who better to admin your server than a company run by 
the man himself? That is what we did. He converted our old courier-imap 
server in place (about 350GB of mail for about 70 users) in a very short 
period of time, and none of our users even noticed.

http://www.dovecot.fi/

> Do you have any tips about what is important knowledge that an external
> company must have to properly maintain my server system? (mail server,
> backup, security etc)

Way too broad of a subject... either you know, or you don't, and if you 
don't, it is up to you to decide if you want to spend the time and 
effort to learn it yourself (but what about securing things while you're 
learning?), or pay someone else to do it. And security is an entirely 
separate subject all its own.

I consider myself to be reasonably competent (far from expert), but I 
know my own limitations and feel more comfortable having paid support 
from Timo's company...

I'm also very curious about the upcoming (commercial) Object Storage 
support that will be available in 2.2 for real time cloud backup and to 
offload older emails from our local server... but that is another email...

-- 

Best regards,

Charles