[Dovecot] 1.0alpha5 released

Jeroen Scheerder Jeroen.Scheerder at phil.uu.nl
Wed Dec 14 10:45:03 EET 2005


Tomi Hakala:

> Oliver Schulze L. wrote:
>> Really interesting. I also think that there could be a better solution
>> between mbox and maildir.
>> Later, if you could port it to procmail, it should be very popular.
> 
> Why procmail? Dovecot has its own LDA which has similar filtering
> capabilities than procmail and it keeps indexes up to date.

Ok, I'll bite.

Procmail has been very widely deployed for a long, long time.  Not only has it 
its proven track record gained system administators' confidence, but there's 
also the not-so-small matter of having existing procmail filters, doing their 
thing.

With a few thousand users, I find that only a relatively small number of them 
has personalized procmail filtering set up.  Still, that "relatively small 
number" may amount to a hundred procmailrc files or so.  The users that wrote 
up a filter for themselves typically are power users, and their procmail 
recipes can be involved, so say the least.

Now if there were a way in which LDA could be used in conjunction with a 
site-wide filter that chains procmail whenever a user has a .procmailrc, that 
might be a nice step.  You'd get LDA delivery for those without their own 
procmail, and procmail delivery for those with, right?

Not using LDA, I'm not sure whether this is possible, though.  If it is, I'd 
say the scenario deserves mention on Dovecot's wiki, as a migration scenario 
that might be relevant for many of us.


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