[Dovecot] Dovecot has no understandable configuration any more

[Forum]

Hello Steffen,

Am 02.05.2013 10:17, schrieb Steffen Kaiser:
> On Tue, 30 Apr 2013, forum wrote:
>
>> Now i have found the solution.
>> It seems to help to ask you. ;)
>>
>> The solution was to change from
>> listen = [::]
>> to
>> listen = *, [::]
>>
>> There is no explanation for it - just try and error ...
>
> Hmm, [::] -> in6addr_any (any in IPv6 protocol), therefore you had no listener (er, Dovecot listener process) on IPv4,
> but IPv6 only. Maybe Dovecot v1 handled [::] differently and added *.

I can only say that it was working afterwards.

>
>> I lost many hours just to find out that i have to define e.g.
>> service imap-login {
>> Before there was no error, dovecot running and no ports listening.
>
> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Tools/Doveconf
> has the example:
>
> "
> doveconf can be also used to convert v1.x configuration files into v2.x format.
>
> doveconf -n -c /oldpath/dovecot.conf > /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf.new
> "

Good to know - but to late for me.
The utilites are a good idea!

I think there are (to many) details handled slightly different.
Of course this is no problem - but not easy to find out.

I had some problems like this upgrading from exim 4.6 to 4.8 - but not so hard.
Dovecot steps into the same problems as exim.
It becomes so mighty that everything is possible - but it is hard to understand how to master it.
The wiki is a good solution, but i miss a description of the dependencies that are not clear.
You only understand it when you have mastered it.

>>>> Has someone an idea how to migrate the emails from charset ISO8859-1 to UTF-8?
>>>
>>> The mailbody? recode Latin1..utf8 < in > out, but IMAP defines, that
>>> you cannot change messages inplace. The client need to redownload
>>> them.
>>
>> The client should left the message on the server with no local copy.
>
> No, I mean: IMAP defines that messages are immutable, you must not change a message file on the server. Therefore you
> cannot recode a message file on the server and hope that the clients pick up the change. You need to cause that the MUAs
> think that the modified message is new. E.g. with Maildir backend you rename each message file:

Yes - i understand.
The encoding is defined in the email - so this should be no problem.

I had the problem that Thunderbird deletes some Emails because he thought they should be deleted.
Is this marked somewhere?

>
> 1367436834.P516Q0M961879.server:2,Sa
> -> 1367436834.P516Q0M961879.server.a:2,Sa

Ahh - good to know.

>
> see change before ":". Then each MUA thinks that it had not seen the message, because Dovecot assigns a new UID to it.

At least i deleted all the index files and stepped with the client through the directories.
Now everything is working fine.

Thanks for your help and tips!

Cheers
Karsten