Headsup on feature removal

[Philip Colmer]

> Additionally, the mbox format will no longer receive new development. It will still be
> maintained, however its use beyond migrations and other limited use cases will be discouraged.

As someone who digs into instructions to find just the bits and pieces
needed to get things going, is there any guidance on how to configure
dovecot to use something other than mbox? At the moment, we have
postfix delivering mail as normal and then dovecot providing the IMAP
layer on top of that mbox file.

Thank you.

Philip

On Tue, 17 Mar 2020 at 06:51, Aki Tuomi <aki.tuomi at dovecot.fi> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> Dovecot is now a nearly 20 year old product, and during that time it has accumulated many different features and plugins in its core repository.
>
> We are starting to gradually remove some of these parts, which are unused, untested or deprecated.
> We will provide advance notification before removing anything.
>
> To start, the following features are likely to be removed in next few releases of Dovecot.
>
>  - Authentication drivers: vpopmail, checkpassword, bsdauth, shadow, sia
>  - Password schemes: HMAC-MD5, RPA, SKEY, PLAIN-MD4, LANMAN, NTLM, SMD5
>  - Authentication mechanisms: ntlm, rpa, skey
>  - Dict drivers: memcached, memcached-ascii (use redis instead)
>  - postfix postmap support
>  - autocreate & autosubscribe plugins (use built-in auto=create/subscribe setting instead)
>  - expire plugin (use built-in autoexpunge setting)
>  - fts-squat plugin
>  - mailbox alias plugin
>  - mail-filter plugin
>  - snarf plugin
>  - xz compression algorithm
>
> For the authentication drivers that are being removed, we suggest using Lua as a replacement. See
> https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/authentication/lua_based_authentication/
>
> For information about converting between password schemes, see
> https://wiki2.dovecot.org/HowTo/ConvertPasswordSchemes
>
> If you are using any of these features, please start preparing for their removal in the near
> future. Features will begin to be dropped as of v2.3.11.
>
> Additionally, the mbox format will no longer receive new development. It will still be
> maintained, however its use beyond migrations and other limited use cases will be discouraged.
>
> Please contact us via the mailing list if you have any questions.
>
> Regards,
> Dovecot Team