On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Timo Sirainen <[email protected]> wrote: > I've noticed that a lot of people are using e.g.: > > mail_location = maildir:/var/vmail/%d/%n > > Then either they don't have home directory set, or their home directory > is the same as the maildir. http://wiki.dovecot.org/VirtualUsers/Home > explains all the problems of not separate home and mail directories. > > Also whenever I try to suggest using a separate home and mail directory, > the answer is way too often: "But I'm using virtual users. (They don't > have home directories.)" > > So I started wondering. Maybe simply renaming the "home" to something > else would help here at least some. Make all of the documentation use > only the new word, and add alias for userdb so that the new name and the > "home" both work (I guess docs would need to keep using the "home" as > field name for some more years). > > So far I've only come up with "vhome" as the replacement name. Other > ideas?
Id like to share my experience that I just went through Sunday. Four years ago I took over as sysadmin, and one of the things I did was clean up our mail system. One of the decisions I made was to get rid of what at the time seemed like an unnecessary extra folder called ".maildir" in every user's directory, which was only mail. So I moved all data to just /mail/domain/initial/username and that seemed to be great. Now however, I am wishing I never did that. I seem to be having issues giving /mail/domain/initial/username as the home and maildir:~/ as the maildir (per user userdb mysql etc). So I started a new quick project to move back to having a maildir folder in the user directory, also so I could then migrate to mdbox by having an mdbox folder there. Well on Sunday I had a mixup and i set all my user's home's to maildir:~/ which had a side effect of *moving* my entire domain folder to a different location, all 468 gigs of it and I thought it had all been deleted, total panic attack and a good two hours of going WTF and wanting to cry since my backup had also started running at the same time so I was missing all kinds of stuff on my live backup server, and to top it off, my third incremental backup server had a bad drive so that was totally flaky. Anyway, I learned two lessons here. 1) Dont procrastinate fixing your backup server even if you have a third and think its not a big deal at the time and 2) I wish I would have kept the "maildir" folder in the user's "home" directory, even if they are virtual users. On a side note, I happened to find my domain's mail directory and successfully merged it back with only minor noise from customers noticing. Good thing it was a sunday and the fair was in town. /rookiemove FTL
