Re: [Dovecot] Disable IMAP for certain users, but not Webmailer
FORMER 03 | Baltasar Cevc wrote: Hi Russel, On Sun, 05 Aug 2007 08:28:12 -0700 Don Russell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 1 - storage is cheap - Costco sells a 1 TByte external drive for approx $US 300. That holds a LOT of e-mail. The 500 GByte is less than half that price. The problem is not storage as such. It's reliability of storage. For a good server, you need a hardware raid + backup, the latter being the real problem (mostly the time to make the backup, 1 TB would need quite some hours ;-) Presumably you would not accumulate 1 TByte of data before your first backup using incremental back up would alleviate the time problem. So what I'm hearing is you will back up the mail on the server, but the mail retrieved by POP3 is the user's responsibility... i.e. it won't get backed up. So you want to restrict IMAP use to only those users who need their mail backed up. ;-) Not sure what your situation is, but in the USA laws are underway for requiring corporations to keep ALL e-mail ... not sure what the state of those laws are maybe they won't materialize but obviously people are thinking along those lines... Based on your e-mail address, I assume you are not subject to US laws etc... but I think it's a "sign" of things to come in the corporate world. Anyway, I've taken this a bit off track... I do not know exactly how to implement what you asked for POP3 for some, IMAP for others. :-( Off the top of my head since both of those protocols need authentication it ought to be possible to define credentials on a per-user basis so IMAP is successful only for some users. I would research IMAP authentication methods... you want the password file (database, whatever) to contain only a subset of the system users shouldn't be too difficult, just a bit of "double entry" when adding new users to te system.
Re: [Dovecot] Subfolders
Scott Silva wrote: Azher Amin spake the following on 8/5/2007 3:59 AM: Hi, Does dovecot supports sub folders ?? I tried creating a subfolder for a folder under the main tree Thunderbird allows you creating but doesn't show up ... Plz suggest how it can be enabled. Regards -Azher Dovecot with thunderbird only seems to support sub folders if you are using maildir type mailstores. I don't think it will work if using mbox. Not true. I use Thunderbird as my mail client, and create subfolders... I use mbox. (Though I intend to convert to maildir eventually) When you create a folder, you have to decide whether the folder will contain messages only, or other folders. Folders and mesages can not be contained in the same folder.
Re: [Dovecot] Disable IMAP for certain users, but not Webmailer
FORMER 03 | Baltasar Cevc wrote: Hi everybody, I'm planning to set up our new mail system using the Dovecot mailbox server. It mostly works fine yet (it's quite straigt forward to set up, I'd say), but there's a thing I haven't been able to find out yet. We provide POP3 access for all users, but want to restrict IMAP access to some of them (because IMAP users tend to leave more messages on the server, thus increasing storage needs). [snip] 1 - storage is cheap - Costco sells a 1 TByte external drive for approx $US 300. That holds a LOT of e-mail. The 500 GByte is less than half that price. 2 - why not enforce quotas? I assume you could set quotas by user. POP users could opt to keep a copy on the server, so that doesn't guarantee anything. I prefer IMAP because then I can access the same mail from different clients computers...
Re: [Dovecot] deleting maildir files
Kirill Miazine wrote: * Don Russell [2007-07-16 10:23]: Can we delete maildir files directly from the file system? [...] And if we cannot delete files with the 'rm' command, whats the best/proper way to delete these older files. My opinion has always been that the data structure should not be replied upon if you want to do things with your mail items, then use the APIs/imap commands to do it. That protects you from any internal stuff you didn't know about, or changed from one server to another, or one version to another. Maildir is a sort of a standard with some sort of an API, isn't it? The "standard" (<http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html>) says following: An MUA can read and delete messages while new mail is being delivered: each message is stored in a separate file with a unique name, so it isn't affected by operations on other messages. True, but why tie my script to one format, when it can work equally well with *any* format supported by the IMAP server? :-) If new and improved formats develop, I don't have to rewrite my scripts. :-) For example, I have the beginnings of a script to handle my "mail retention policies". It connects to Dovecot/imap to get the list of mail for specific folders, then uses the imap delete (or copy) API to delete mail older than n days, or to keep only the most recent n messages. That sort of thing. With Maildir it's trivial to do this sort of things with a shell script. Yes, I suppose it is. :-) However, in my case (and I wrote the script for my own use) my mail is in mbox format. Eventually I want to convert it to maildir or something else (dbox?) and since my script uses the IMAP interface, I won't have to change anything, the IMAP server does all the heavy lifting. :-) The benefit is my script then doesn't care how Dovecot (or whichever server) stores things and if a mailbox changes from mbox to maildir format, or similar change.. no worries... my script just doesn't care... it always uses the APIs to manipulate mail. Safe, but admittedly not as fast. I favor reliability over speed in these sorts of cases. :-) That's a valid point. It's much easier to shoot one's own leg pretty ugly, when deleting/renaming/whatevert the files in the Maildir directly. IMAP SEARCH is IMHO a bit easier to understand than find(1). Best wishes, Kirill Cheers :-)
Re: [Dovecot] deleting maildir files
Tom Bombadil wrote:
Greetings all...
Can we delete maildir files directly from the file system?
Basically, we use dovecot to train spam, and we want to delete messages
that are older than 30 days, using a simple "find /maildirs -cname +30
-name *imap-server* -exec rm {} \;"
I have seen a post a while ago saying that dovecot can rebuild the
indexes, but I don't remember if it's when the index is deleted or when
the maildir files are deleted.
And if we cannot delete files with the 'rm' command, whats the
best/proper way to delete these older files.
Thanks
My opinion has always been that the data structure should not be replied
upon if you want to do things with your mail items, then use the
APIs/imap commands to do it. That protects you from any internal stuff
you didn't know about, or changed from one server to another, or one
version to another.
For example, I have the beginnings of a script to handle my "mail
retention policies". It connects to Dovecot/imap to get the list of mail
for specific folders, then uses the imap delete (or copy) API to delete
mail older than n days, or to keep only the most recent n messages. That
sort of thing.
The benefit is my script then doesn't care how Dovecot (or whichever
server) stores things and if a mailbox changes from mbox to maildir
format, or similar change.. no worries... my script just doesn't care...
it always uses the APIs to manipulate mail.
Safe, but admittedly not as fast. I favor reliability over speed in
these sorts of cases. :-)
Re: [Dovecot] Connecting to dovecot/imap without a password
Timo Sirainen wrote: On 11.7.2007, at 0.07, Don Russell wrote: I have written a script that connects (localhost) to the dovecot/imap server and performs various maintenance on my mail, by folder. deleting old stuff, keeping the n most recent, that sort of crap, er good stuff. :-) My script is written in php (I use the various imap_* functions), and it connects to the imap server running on the same machine... is there a way to connect to the server without having to specify my user name and password? I was thinking there may be some form of "implied" logon if a request from user "don" requests to log on to user "don", then there's no need for a password check, when the connection is via localhost. How about using master users? http://wiki.dovecot.org/Authentication/MasterUsers The master user password can be empty of course also.. You can limit the allowed IPs with http://wiki.dovecot.org/PasswordDatabase/ExtraFields/AllowNets Thank you. I think this will work well for me.
[Dovecot] Connecting to dovecot/imap without a password
I have written a script that connects (localhost) to the dovecot/imap server and performs various maintenance on my mail, by folder. deleting old stuff, keeping the n most recent, that sort of crap, er good stuff. :-) My script is written in php (I use the various imap_* functions), and it connects to the imap server running on the same machine... is there a way to connect to the server without having to specify my user name and password? I was thinking there may be some form of "implied" logon if a request from user "don" requests to log on to user "don", then there's no need for a password check, when the connection is via localhost. That way I don't have to deal with userid/password related issues. :-) Thanks
Re: [Dovecot] dovecot lda with fetchmail
JC Júnior wrote: hi all, I'm new in dovecot, and i need to setup a machine that download emails from an external pop3 server, and delivers to my internal network via imap, for this , i want ( if possible ) to use fetchmail with the option mda to dovecot's deliver, because all user must be virtual users stored in a sqlite database, and my question is: 1- it is possible?? 2- theres a better way to do this?? 3- someone knows some howto about this configuration??? I do this... sort of fetchmail --> sendmail --> procmail --> mbox/maildir storage <--> imap <--> pc client
Re: [Dovecot] mbox vs maildir
Don Russell wrote: I'm using Dovecot 1.0.1-12 on Linux/Fedora 7 along with sendmail and procmail all running on the same box mail is stored in mbox format [snip] Thanks to all who replied. This seems to have sparked quite a discussion, and given me quite a bit to read/look into. Sounds like dbox is worth waiting for. I'd I'm going to convert from mbox, I'd rather convert once. :-)
[Dovecot] mbox vs maildir
I'm using Dovecot 1.0.1-12 on Linux/Fedora 7 along with sendmail and procmail all running on the same box mail is stored in mbox format It's a small system with a half dozen or so e-mail "accounts". Each with 40-60MB of messages in various folders. I keep seeing messages about how mbox is antiquated and anybody with more than 100 messages etc should not use mbox, but use maildir instead. I'm not entirely convinced there seem to be pros and cons for each. Is there a discussion somewhere that really highlights why one format is so much better than the other? The last time I tried to convert from mbox to maildir, things got pretty botched up, no data loss, but it wasn't pretty. :-) Can Dovecot handle mbox for some users and maildir for others? I'd like to try a conversion for one user... I'll probably create a new user, then have procmail copy (via ! action code) all mail for one user to that new user. Thank you
Re: [Dovecot] Setting retention policies
Timo Sirainen wrote: On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 07:24 -0700, Don Russell wrote: I access e-mail from different PCs, typically using Thunderbird e-mail client. Thunderbird has a a "retention policy" it can set on a folder by folder basis. Policies such as how long to keep messages for, or how many messages to keep. Is there a way to set those policies on the server itself? http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Expire But unfortunately you'd have to wait for v1.1 to use it. Good to know and you just added another project to my to-do list: learn how to write a plugin :-) But, I have some other ideas of my own I think I'll pursue if I like how it turns out I'll put it "out there" as FOSS. :-) Chers, Don
Re: [Dovecot] Setting retention policies
Bill Cole wrote: At 7:24 AM -0700 6/25/07, Don Russell imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding: I access e-mail from different PCs, typically using Thunderbird e-mail client. Thunderbird has a a "retention policy" it can set on a folder by folder basis. Policies such as how long to keep messages for, or how many messages to keep. Is there a way to set those policies on the server itself? Dovecot itself does not have such a facility, but if you use Maildir it is a fairly straightforward bit of scripting to whack message files greater than a particular age because they are in predictable places and have names starting with their delivery time as a Unix epoch time. Thanks Bill, Right now I use mbox format, my last conversion effort to maildir didn't go very well to say the least. Since scripting will be required anyway, I think I'll work on a tool that uses the IMAP protocol to accomplish what I want. Then such a script could be useful regardless of mbox/maildir storage methods. Cheers, Don
[Dovecot] Setting retention policies
I access e-mail from different PCs, typically using Thunderbird e-mail client. Thunderbird has a a "retention policy" it can set on a folder by folder basis. Policies such as how long to keep messages for, or how many messages to keep. Is there a way to set those policies on the server itself? Thank you
