- dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] IMAP and webmail applications
by Tom Allison 18 Jun '04

18 Jun '04

I've been hunting around for a webmail application other than squirrelmail for reasons that really don't matter. But I'm seeing that a lot of these applications tend to sometimes access servers via IMAP, but they always seem to have a touch more information needed than might be for an IMAP session. An example is openwebmail. It authenticates very similar to how dovecot authenticates, with a userdb and passdb specifications. It reads directly off the disk for some of it's activities. As for squirrelmail, they seem to want a lot of information regarding the mail architecture (mbox, maildir, folder locations...) and I don't really see where this could come into play with an IMAP implimentation. So, not actually having read all 82 pages of RFC 2060 (but I did print them!), I'm trying to see what I might miss if I were to attempt a web mail application that was based entirely upon IMAPv4 with the only information known prior to connection is the server name. Kind of like my mail client. Will I get into trouble with mail directories/folders if I start accessing different IMAP servers other than dovecot? Can I discover this without any hints from the user? I'm not sure exactly what I'm asking for here, other than some thoughts on what I might have to watch out for or do without (when comparing to squirrelmail as an example). I know I'll have to do something different if someone wants an addressbook, but I'm not there yet.

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[Dovecot] 1.0-test16 - nearing usable state
by Timo Sirainen 18 Jun '04

18 Jun '04

http://dovecot.org/test/ Here you go, maildir syncing problems finally fixed (I hope). Well, except there's this "new-dir-only syncing" optimization which I'm not really sure if it works as it should. The bug really was in index code as I was beginning to suspect. The good thing is that while trying to figure it out over the last several weeks I thought of many other potential problems (race conditions) which got fixed. Those would have been much harder to find than this one :) Finally I thought I'd stop looking at the code and just begin dumping tons of debugging data to see where exactly it goes wrong. After few hours of debugging I figured out it was because message was being removed from index but not from maildir. 5 hours of sleep later I woke up, thought a while, figured out where it must be, got up, half an hour more debugging and found it. :) Code merging two UID range buffers into one was buggy, inserting one line of code fixed it. So .. Maybe I'll finally start using this myself now. The next important problems seem to be some random error messages about index locking timeouts and some asserts in some situations.

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Re: [Dovecot] IMAP and webmail applications
by durango99 18 Jun '04

18 Jun '04

i thought squirrelmail would be way too much of an overkill for my needs also but i went for it. i'm using debian and i got the squirrelmail package installed and working within 15 minutes. what really makes life easy is that squirrelmail comes with a configuration utility (squirrelmail-configure). it was very easy to get things configured without worry about a lot of conf files :) i also like the many plugins that people have created for squirrelmail. it's also very simple to add these plugins into squirrelmail using squirrelmail-configure. i had originally been ssh and mutt to check my mail, but i decided it be nice to have a web front-end and squirrelmail /apache /dovecot /procmail /spamassassin /gotmail /getmail /fetchyahoo have been a good mix for me. the hardest part for me was figuring out procmail and not squirrelmail :) my 2 cents, dan > I've been hunting around for a webmail application other than > squirrelmail for reasons that really don't matter. > > But I'm seeing that a lot of these applications tend to sometimes access servers via IMAP, but they always seem to have a touch more information needed than might be for an IMAP session. > > An example is openwebmail. It authenticates very similar to how dovecot authenticates, with a userdb and passdb specifications. It reads directly off the disk for some of it's activities. > > As for squirrelmail, they seem to want a lot of information regarding the mail architecture (mbox, maildir, folder locations...) and I don't really see where this could come into play with an IMAP implimentation. > > So, not actually having read all 82 pages of RFC 2060 (but I did print them!), I'm trying to see what I might miss if I were to attempt a web mail application that was based entirely upon IMAPv4 with the only information known prior to connection is the server name. Kind of like my mail client. > > Will I get into trouble with mail directories/folders if I start accessing different IMAP servers other than dovecot? Can I discover this without any hints from the user? > > I'm not sure exactly what I'm asking for here, other than some thoughts on what I might have to watch out for or do without (when comparing to squirrelmail as an example). I know I'll have to do something different if someone wants an addressbook, but I'm not there yet. >

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[Dovecot] shared authentication
by Kevin 16 Jun '04

16 Jun '04

whats the recommended way to share a user auth info between dovecot and postfix? sasldb seems like it could work but nobody really seems to like using the giant mass that is sasl. i also cant find any information on actually getting dovecot to use sasl past the configure options. i looked at timo's patch for postfix to use dovecot-auth but it doesnt apply correctly on the 2.1 branch. so what are people using to share passwords between the two without using the system passwd?

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[Dovecot] POP3 LAST command?
by Christian Balzer 16 Jun '04

16 Jun '04

Hello, any plans to support this in the future? Seems the inability to use LAST breaks that Yahoo remote mailbox slurper thing, not that I care too much about that, but some mail clients might miss it as well. ;) Regards, Christian Balzer -- Christian Balzer Network/Systems Engineer NOC chibi(a)gol.com Global OnLine Japan/Fusion Network Services http://www.gol.com/

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[Dovecot] Return (revenge?) of the "pop-lock".
by Christian Balzer 16 Jun '04

16 Jun '04

Hello, The users here have been migrated to the new mail system with dovecot 0.99.10.5 (Debian package) on the backends. Storage is maildir, only pop3 access for now. I see very seldom occurrences (compared to the session wide pop lock of qpopper on the old system) like this: --- Jun 16 14:35:52 mb01 pop3(user(a)gol.com): Timeout while waiting for release of exclusive fcntl() lock for index file /mail/spool/mb01/9ef/f73/af.user/.INBOX/.imap.index --- These are people with slow connections and at least one large mail in the box, with their client aborting w/o terminating the session properly. I presume the timeout for this is hardcoded, as all the config parameters for timeouts are mbox related, rite? Regards, Christian Balzer -- Christian Balzer Network/Systems Engineer NOC chibi(a)gol.com Global OnLine Japan/Fusion Network Services http://www.gol.com/

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[Dovecot] /var/mail dotlocking workaround
by Timo Sirainen 16 Jun '04

16 Jun '04

I added "mail_extra_groups" setting which can be used to give imap/pop3 process access to additional groups. So what this means is if you set it to "mail" you can finally remove o-w access from /var/mail directory. Leaving the sticky bit could still be a good idea, so there's no way users to be able to delete each others inboxes. Here's a patch against 0.99.10.5: http://dovecot.org/patches/mail-extra-groups.diff

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[Dovecot] dovecot non-local users
by Tom Allison 16 Jun '04

16 Jun '04

From the docs: System without local users -------------------------- <snip> Having one uid per user would mean that in case of a security hole in Dovecot, the user still couldn't read other peoples mails. Use this if possible. ----- I don't quite understand this one. If you aren't a local user, what's the uid all about? Do I do something like: create a user for mydomain in /etc/passwd (eg: user:domain_dude, home:/var/dovecot) with a valid home/uid/gid. Plug in the uid/gid/home for domain_dude in the authentication and have a data structure of /var/dovecot/%d/%n/Maildir or %h/%d/%d/Maildir where %h = "/var/dovecot" via /etc/passwd. Something like that?

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[Dovecot] review of my configuration
by Tom Allison 16 Jun '04

16 Jun '04

Over the last week I've set up dovecot and imap and imaps support. I've even tried to break it but it's been doing very well. Now I'm trying to set up a webmail interface. Rather than use the common squirrelmail, I thought I would try openwebmail. Mainly because it's written in perl, of which I am a big fan. However, I ran into some errors in openwebmail that actually may tie back to dovecot. Here's how: dovecot configuration userdb = /etc/passwd passdb = pgsql.... ---this allows me to use the $HOME, uid, gid from the passwd file and not have to carry two copies of it (/etc/passwd and pgsql) However, under openwebmail I don't seem to have this option as they are really determined to require a home, uid, gid for each user that logs in. As witnessed by the following line: Tue Jun 15 20:23:34 2004 - [31572] (unknown) tallison - userinfo error - auth_pgsql.pl, ret -3, Can't execute SQL statement: ERROR: column "uid" does not exist Sure looks familiar doesn't it? (see, it's relevant!) Since I was thinking that maybe it might be interesting to do some email set up to support multiple domains and users some day, and I want to try out the openwebmail sooner than that. I'm getting the impression that it might be easier if I just made the leap today and started to reconfigure everything for multiple domain hosting and all the cool stuff. Now, I can probably muddle through this without too much internal damage. But I keep getting stuck on one point. How can I filter the delivery of email like I do with procmail, when I am delivering mail to many users, none of whom have a /etc/passwd entry? Are there any alternative ideas on how to do this?

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[Dovecot] cvs changelog
by Geo Carncross 15 Jun '04

15 Jun '04

FEI: the CVS changelog is no longer updating. cras's commits look like this: date: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS +TZDD; author cras; state Exp; lines +1 -0 but cvs2cl.pl (2.50) demands: date: YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS; author cras; state: Exp; lines +1 -0 cvs2cl.pl version 2.55 still can't parse these lines. I patched my cvs2cl.pl so I could still follow dovecot, but I'm not certain these changes actually belong in cvs2cl.pl --- /s/2.55-orig/cvs2cl.pl 2004-06-15 18:58:54.000000000 +0000 +++ /s/2.55/cvs2cl.pl 2004-06-15 18:59:14.000000000 +0000 @@ -2286,7 +2286,7 @@ my ($year, $mon, $mday, $hours, $min, $secs, $author, $state, $rest) = $line =~ - m!(\d+)/(\d+)/(\d+)\s+(\d+):(\d+):(\d+);\s+ + m!(\d+)[/-](\d+)[/-](\d+)\s+(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)(?:.*?);\s+ author:\s+([^;]+);\s+state:\s+([^;]+);(.*)!x or die "Couldn't parse date ``$line''"; die "Bad date or Y2K issues"

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