Why can't you make HA out of Dovecot CE? Mounting disk using NAS to multiple servers and take it as a maildir storage, and have dovecot running in each with a POP loading balancing requests having HAProxy e.g. in frontend. Also using perhaps MySQL Cluster for virtual users and connect dovecot to it?
This sounds to me from experience point of view very doable, and not sure why you think it isnt? No need for syncing data, since NAS will have data already synced and the bigger it gets the more disks you need to extend the RAID rack and you can build another server and rack as backup and write small script to take backup everyday and its sorted? Zak. On 2025-08-31 17:30, John Fawcett via dovecot wrote: > On 31/08/2025 17:02, Gerben Wierda via dovecot wrote: >> Will doveadm sync in a cron job give me something resembling HA? Don't >> think so. Replicator does. So, read my question not as 'syncing' is >> deprecated, but HA-syncing (via replicator) is. >> As far as I understand it, replicator sends the message immediately to the >> other side as it arrives. A, say, once every 15 minutes cron job running a >> new doveadm sync doesn't match that. >> So yes, syncing is not deprecated (I wrote that incorrectly). Doesn't >> change my situation as replicator is, and I want a true HA solution. >> G >> >> > Hi Gerben > > it's clear that starting from Dovecot 2.4 the Community Edition is not meant to support a HA scenario. Dovecot Pro does, but it's not aimed at SoHo as far as I am aware. > > Personally I have never had an HA solution (with dovecot Director etc) since for me it was overkill. I have always used Dovecot with replication as a Disaster Recovery solution - so a backup server that could be brought on line manually and that contained almost all the email history, with exception of limited amount of email that arrived while the disaster was happening. With replication I probably would have had a very small window of email that could be lost, but considering my volumes, expanding that window is not particularly risky. > > I have abandoned replication (which if I remember had some unaddressed issues anyway), and am now doing periodic syncs. I do them every 10 minutes, but I guess it could be done more frequently too providing there is some locking logic in the cron job to avoid running multiple syncs (as well as the doveadm sync -l (lock) parameter that someone pointed out to me too). > > I don't believe that you will be able to make a truly HA solution from Dovecot CE. If I'm wrong, I'd be glad to hear about it from anyone that has done it. I think you could aim for a Disaster Recovery solution that could be more automated the more effort is put into it. > > John > > > > _______________________________________________ > dovecot mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
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