IMAP logging / rawlog

[Timo Sirainen]

On 04 Apr 2015, at 02:58, G H <uothrawn at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> I am trying to monitor with Nagios that my phones are consistently checking into dovecot via IMAP. I used to be able to parse syslog for imap-login messages. I have since updated my phones, the phoness email client (k9-mail) and dovecot. Now the imap-login messages are few and far between. However, I can clearly see via tcpdump that some traffic is happening when I click refresh on k9. I enabled "rawlog" support in dovecot, but it doesn't seem to write to disc frequently enough.
> 
> 
> 1) Does anyone have a better suggestion for how to monitor that my phone is checking in regularly?

Writing a plugin would be the cleanest way to do this..

> 2) Is there a flush-to-disk capability for rawlog in dovecot?

It was behaving like that before v2.2.14 started optimizing the rawlog writes by buffering them. I added now code to flush the rawlog every second: http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.2/rev/ee001c131952

> 3) Also, when you have imap_zlib plugin enabled, the rawlog logs the raw compressed data instead of the decompressed IMAP commands. Is this an oversight?

The way it's currently implemented it can't work otherwise. That's why there is "doveadm dump -t imapzlib raw.log" command to decode it.

It would be possible to implement rawlog differently also by having the imap processes write them directly, but this would require more development. This is actually how imap-login -R parameter also does rawlogging. (I think it only does pre-login rawlogging, but you could see if it happens to be writing post-login rawlog as well.)