I'm trying to set up a Cyrus IMAP server. It requires an IMAP password, but I don't see any default or way to set it. What's the secret here?
tnx jk
James Knott wrote:
I'm trying to set up a Cyrus IMAP server. It requires an IMAP password, but I don't see any default or way to set it. What's the secret here?
tnx jk
Further on this. I read that Cyrus does not require users to be set up on the Linux box, like the UoW imap server does. This is not an issue for me, as everyone will have a Linux account for other reasons. I have also used UoW before. Should I be using other than Cyrus? The only reason I went with it is because it was the default imap server install with opensuse 11.4. What about dovecot?
tnx jk
On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 10:24 PM, James Knott james.knott@rogers.com wrote:
James Knott wrote:
Further on this. I read that Cyrus does not require users to be set up on the Linux box, like the UoW imap server does. This is not an issue for me, as everyone will have a Linux account for other reasons. I have also used UoW before. Should I be using other than Cyrus? The only reason I went with it is because it was the default imap server install with opensuse 11.4. What about dovecot?
I have an email server with postfix+dovecot(imap)+mysql and the user does not need to have a linux account (and shell access). I set dovecot to authenticate against a database. Of course it can use others authentication method, see http://wiki.dovecot.org/PasswordDatabase and http://wiki.dovecot.org/UserDatabase
On 8/26/2011 8:24 AM, James Knott wrote:
James Knott wrote:
I'm trying to set up a Cyrus IMAP server. It requires an IMAP password, but I don't see any default or way to set it. What's the secret here?
tnx jk
Further on this. I read that Cyrus does not require users to be set up on the Linux box, like the UoW imap server does. This is not an issue for me, as everyone will have a Linux account for other reasons. I have also used UoW before. Should I be using other than Cyrus? The only reason I went with it is because it was the default imap server install with opensuse 11.4. What about dovecot?
tnx jk
Dovecot gets good reviews. Cyrus seems to work for me just fine. It seems bullit proof. See 6.4 on this page: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Cyrus-IMAP.html 6.4 Adding the default user
John Andersen wrote:
On 8/26/2011 8:24 AM, James Knott wrote:
James Knott wrote:
I have also used UoW before. Should I be using other than Cyrus? The only reason I went with it is because it was the default imap server install with opensuse 11.4. What about dovecot?
Dovecot gets good reviews. Cyrus seems to work for me just fine. It seems bullit proof. See 6.4 on this page: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Cyrus-IMAP.html 6.4 Adding the default user
--- I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast....
Tbird gets a bit bogged down when I first open email after leaving it for a while (as the imap store with about ~250 subscribed folders), but with only about 75-80 active ones (that get email when I'm not connected). But that's the only time it gets slow -- and the slowdown is on single-threaded TB, not on the server... you can also install an indexing sieve filter for higher perf, but I haven't needed that (and I don't think TB will make use of it)..for cross folder searching and such...
Linda Walsh wrote:
John Andersen wrote:
On 8/26/2011 8:24 AM, James Knott wrote:
James Knott wrote: I have also used UoW before. Should I be using other than Cyrus? The only reason I went with it is because it was the default imap server install with opensuse 11.4. What about dovecot?
Dovecot gets good reviews. Cyrus seems to work for me just fine. It seems bullit proof. See 6.4 on this page: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Cyrus-IMAP.html 6.4 Adding the default user
I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast....
Tbird gets a bit bogged down when I first open email after leaving it for a while (as the imap store with about ~250 subscribed folders), but with only about 75-80 active ones (that get email when I'm not connected). But that's the only time it gets slow -- and the slowdown is on single-threaded TB, not on the server... you can also install an indexing sieve filter for higher perf, but I haven't needed that (and I don't think TB will make use of it)..for cross folder searching and such...
Tnx. I guess I'll go with Dovecot then. This is a new systems, so there's no worry about converting etc., but everyone who has email also has a regular Linux account, so that's one benefit of Cyrus that won't make much difference to me.
All these questions recently are about a server I'm building at work. It's both file & print and email. It'll serve employees in both Canada & U.S. There's already VPN access & IPv6 via Cisco router and will also have site-site VPN. The only problem I haven't been able to resolve so far is printing to a Samsung printer from users running Windows 7. It works fine with XP and the other two printers work fine from either. This server is replacing one running Windows 7 and the performance improvement is dramatic. Also, the W7 server could be flakey at times.
Linda Walsh wrote:
I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast....
I've been running UoW at home for years, where it has a single account. While it generally works well, I find that if I leave Seamonkey mail running and then access my mail from another computer with either Seamonkey or Thunderbird, the Seamonkey on my main computer often locks up, though for some reason, accessing my mail from my Android phone does not cause this. I have seen some hints in the Dovecot docs that it will fix this sort of problem. So, I may change my home system from UoW to Dovecot, when I upgrade to a newer version of openSUSE (currently 11.0). I assume there should be no difficulties in switching to Dovecot since it and UoW both use mbox.
James Knott said the following on 08/28/2011 10:04 AM:
I assume there should be no difficulties in switching to Dovecot since it and UoW both use mbox.
The problems I had ere with namespaces. I had lots of them :-) My real problem wasn't with Dovecot; well OK, my understanding was lacking, but I experimented. My problem was that I forget to set the namespaces on TB to deal with the new syntax.
Once done, Dovecot is fine. A different layout and some changes in semantics for saving drafts, but yes its fast, especially for searching!
Now to kill of Nepomuk since I don't want that indexing ....
Anton Aylward wrote:
James Knott said the following on 08/28/2011 10:04 AM:
I assume there should be no difficulties in switching to Dovecot since it and UoW both use mbox.
The problems I had ere with namespaces. I had lots of them :-) My real problem wasn't with Dovecot; well OK, my understanding was lacking, but I experimented. My problem was that I forget to set the namespaces on TB to deal with the new syntax.
Once done, Dovecot is fine. A different layout and some changes in semantics for saving drafts, but yes its fast, especially for searching!
Now to kill of Nepomuk since I don't want that indexing ....
What are you referring to by "TB"? Thunderbird?
James Knott wrote:
Linda Walsh wrote:
I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast....
I've been running UoW at home for years, where it has a single account. While it generally works well, I find that if I leave Seamonkey mail running and then access my mail from another computer with either Seamonkey or Thunderbird, the Seamonkey on my main computer often locks up, though for some reason, accessing my mail from my Android phone does not cause this. I have seen some hints in the Dovecot docs that it will fix this sort of problem. So, I may change my home system from UoW to Dovecot, when I upgrade to a newer version of openSUSE (currently 11.0). >>>>> I assume there should be no difficulties in switching to Dovecot since it and UoW both use mbox. <<<
--- Bingo!... That's a reason why I avoided 'Cyrus' like plague, and why I moved to dovecot... Dovecot is much better about handling multiple accesses. Dovecot IS configurable to use 'Cyrus' format if someone *wants* that format (i.e. moving from Cyrus).
W/mbox, I have 458 mail folders under 29 dirs with 212638 messages dating back to about 1995...**
With Cyrus, that would be about 487 directories, with 212638 files. -- w/each file rounding up to the 4k fs-block size.
Um...and somehow, doing a search on that w/ 200K opens .. seemed like a recipe for poor performance.
Where as a script too count up all those messages took ... um...3.99 seconds?
yeah, Cyrus would have been faster on that stat using 'find mail -type f|wc -l', but any other filtering?
to get my stats, my script called, parsed the output and summed calls to (echo 'x'|Mail -f <folder>|head -1) for each folder.
Try that on most other formats...
(I know, James, probably preaching to choir...)...
** not counting a Junk/Spam dir w/about the previous years worth of spam that had another 23k messages
On Mon, 2011-08-29 at 19:37 -0700, Linda Walsh wrote:
James Knott wrote:
Linda Walsh wrote:
I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast....
I've been running UoW at home for years, where it has a single account. While it generally works well, I find that if I leave Seamonkey mail running and then access my mail from another computer with either Seamonkey or Thunderbird, the Seamonkey on my main computer often locks up, though for some reason, accessing my mail from my Android phone does not cause this. I have seen some hints in the Dovecot docs that it will fix this sort of problem. So, I may change my home system from UoW to Dovecot, when I upgrade to a newer version of openSUSE (currently 11.0). >>>>> I assume there should be no difficulties in switching to Dovecot since it and UoW both use mbox. <<<
Bingo!... That's a reason why I avoided 'Cyrus' like plague, and why I moved to dovecot... Dovecot is much better about handling multiple accesses. Dovecot IS configurable to use 'Cyrus' format if someone *wants* that format (i.e. moving from Cyrus).
W/mbox, I have 458 mail folders under 29 dirs with 212638 messages dating back to about 1995...**
With Cyrus, that would be about 487 directories, with 212638 files. -- w/each file rounding up to the 4k fs-block size.
Um...and somehow, doing a search on that w/ 200K opens .. seemed like a recipe for poor performance.
Where as a script too count up all those messages took ... um...3.99 seconds?
yeah, Cyrus would have been faster on that stat using 'find mail -type f|wc -l', but any other filtering?
Hi,
regarding speed, would maildir format not be faster than mbox? (for inserting/deleting messages atleast)
hans
Linda Walsh wrote:
Bingo!... That's a reason why I avoided 'Cyrus' like plague, and why I moved to dovecot... Dovecot is much better about handling multiple accesses. Dovecot IS configurable to use 'Cyrus' format if someone *wants* that format (i.e. moving from Cyrus).
I'm still working on this mail server, but I've been busy with other things at work, so it's a "priority" low priority item. ;-) However, I find the documentation to be a bit vague and fragmented, so Dovecot appears to be more difficult to set up than UoW, which I had no problem at all with.
On Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:18:32 +0530, James Knott james.knott@rogers.com wrote:
I'm still working on this mail server, but I've been busy with other things at work, so it's a "priority" low priority item. However, I find the documentation to be a bit vague and fragmented, so Dovecot appears to be more difficult to set up than UoW, which I had no problem at all with.
i found this documentation quite helpful: http://www.dovecot.org/documentation.html
but you're right, it took a bit of reading config. files, man pages, and various documentation on the web before i got it working right. not too bad though, IMO.
On Sun, 2011-09-04 at 08:48 -0400, James Knott wrote:
Linda Walsh wrote:
Bingo!... That's a reason why I avoided 'Cyrus' like plague, and why I moved to dovecot... Dovecot is much better about handling multiple accesses. Dovecot IS configurable to use 'Cyrus' format if someone *wants* that format (i.e. moving from Cyrus).
I'm still working on this mail server, but I've been busy with other things at work, so it's a "priority" low priority item. ;-) However, I find the documentation to be a bit vague and fragmented, so Dovecot appears to be more difficult to set up than UoW, which I had no problem at all with.
Cyrus is *trivial* to configure on openSUSE.
What issues do you have? Or pop over to the very friendly and helpful Cyrus list. http://www.cyrusimap.org/mediawiki/index.php/Cyrus_Mailing_Lists#The_Lists
James Knott wrote:
Linda Walsh wrote:
Bingo!... That's a reason why I avoided 'Cyrus' like plague, and why I moved to dovecot... Dovecot is much better about handling multiple accesses. Dovecot IS configurable to use 'Cyrus' format if someone *wants* that format (i.e. moving from Cyrus).
I'm still working on this mail server, but I've been busy with other things at work, so it's a "priority" low priority item. ;-) However, I find the documentation to be a bit vague and fragmented, so Dovecot appears to be more difficult to set up than UoW, which I had no problem at all with.
I would agree, I found the Dovecot documentation to be lacking, but found the configuration relatively easy after installing it and poking around it's config files, which were broken down by subfunction in my /etc/dovecot dir (on suse...not all break them down, I understand):
ls -R /etc/dovecot/
/etc/dovecot/: conf.d/ dovecot-db.conf.ext dovecot-sql.conf.ext dovecot-2.conf dovecot-dict-sql.conf.ext RCS/ dovecot.conf dovecot-ldap.conf.ext README
/etc/dovecot/conf.d: 10-auth.conf 15-lda.conf auth-deny.conf.ext 10-auth.conf.orig 20-imap.conf auth-ldap.conf.ext 10-director.conf 20-imap.conf.orig auth-master.conf.ext 10-logging.conf 20-lmtp.conf auth-passwdfile.conf.ext 10-logging.conf.orig 20-managesieve.conf auth-sql.conf.ext 10-mail.conf 20-pop3.conf auth-static.conf.ext 10-master.conf 90-acl.conf auth-system.conf.ext 10-master.conf.orig 90-plugin.conf auth-system.conf.ext.orig 10-ssl.conf 90-quota.conf auth-vpopmail.conf.ext 10-ssl.conf.orig 90-sieve.conf RCS/ 10-ssl.conf.rpmnew auth-checkpassword.conf.ext ---- Not all of them need to be configed/altered as you can tell by which ones have 'origs' (at least in the conf.d dir)...(and some of those had changes 'reverted' but left in comments, so the .orig file is still around I was experimenting...
Only config'ed dovecot-2.conf & dovecot.conf in the top level dir.
But I'd agree, it was a bit less well documented, -- but UoW, did come from a university...so you'd have to think it probably be better documented than most! ;-)
-l
On Mon, 2011-08-29 at 19:37 -0700, Linda Walsh wrote:
James Knott wrote:
Linda Walsh wrote:
I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast....
I've been running UoW at home for years, where it has a single account. While it generally works well, I find that if I leave Seamonkey mail running and then access my mail from another computer with either Seamonkey or Thunderbird, the Seamonkey on my main computer often locks up, though for some reason, accessing my mail from my Android phone does not cause this. I have seen some hints in the Dovecot docs that it will fix this sort of problem. So, I may change my home system from UoW to Dovecot, when I upgrade to a newer version of openSUSE (currently 11.0). >>>>> I assume there should be no difficulties in switching to Dovecot since it and UoW both use mbox. <<<
Bingo!... That's a reason why I avoided 'Cyrus' like plague, and why I moved to dovecot... Dovecot is much better about handling multiple accesses.
False. Cyrus handles concurrent access *VERY* well. And recent 2.4.x releases have dramatically improved performance beyond what was available in 2.3.x
W/mbox, I have 458 mail folders under 29 dirs with 212638 messages dating back to about 1995...**
I don't think what you are describing is mbox.
MBOX: "All messages in an mbox mailbox are concatenated and stored as plain text in a single file"
What you are describing is maildir or maildir+ or maybe MH
With Cyrus, that would be about 487 directories, with 212638 files. -- w/each file rounding up to the 4k fs-block size. Um...and somehow, doing a search on that w/ 200K opens .. seemed like a recipe for poor performance.
Or a search on Cyrus would use the SQUAT full-text index and be very fast; or a meta-data search would use on of the maintained meta-data databases and not walk the message tree either.
yeah, Cyrus would have been faster on that stat using 'find mail -type f|wc -l', but any other filtering?
And doing any such thing is bad. If you have an IMAP server you should access your mail via the server.
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
On Mon, 2011-08-29 at 19:37 -0700, Linda Walsh wrote:
James Knott wrote:
Linda Walsh wrote: Bingo!... That's a reason why I avoided 'Cyrus' like plague, and why I moved to dovecot... Dovecot is much better about handling multiple accesses.
False. Cyrus handles concurrent access *VERY* well. And recent 2.4.x releases have dramatically improved performance beyond what was available in 2.3.x
---- Well, depends on your definition of 'well', mine is 'perfect' or not. there is no 'well'.
W/mbox, I have 458 mail folders under 29 dirs with 212638 messages dating back to about 1995...**
I don't think what you are describing is mbox.
MBOX: "All messages in an mbox mailbox are concatenated and stored as plain text in a single file"
What you are describing is maildir or maildir+ or maybe MH
---- Before you comment on these matters too much, you might want to get your d definitions down:
Mbox Mailbox Format
Usually UNIX systems are configured by default to deliver mails to /var/mail/username or /var/spool/mail/username mboxes. In IMAP world these files are called INBOX mailboxes. IMAP protocol supports multiple mailboxes however, so there needs to be a place for them as well. Typically they're stored in ~/mail/ or ~/Mail/ directories.
The mbox file contains all the messages of a single mailbox. Because of this, the mbox format is typically thought of as a slow format. However with Dovecot's indexing this isn't true. Only expunging messages from the beginning of a large mbox file is slow with Dovecot, most other operations should be fast. Also because all the mails are in a single file, searching is much faster than with maildir.
-------------------
Maildir
This format debuted with the qmail server in the mid-1990s. Each mailbox folder is a directory and each message a file. This improves efficiency because individual emails can be modified, deleted and added without affecting the mailbox or other emails, and makes it safer to use on networked file systems such as NFS. ----------------
MH Mailbox Format
The MH mailbox format originated with a system developed by the RAND corporation and the University of California. Each email message is stored in a single file, with directories indicating folders and subfolders. The index or order of the messages in the folder determine what each message is named (which may not correspond to the inode index). The "safe" way to guarantee a message gets written to a mail folder is to first write the message out to a randomly chosen temporary file name, then link or rename the file to the number LAST+1, where LAST is the last sequential message in the folder. If the rename fails, increment the counter and try again.
-------
According to the above... I have mbox.
Ref: http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
And doing any such thing is bad. If you have an IMAP server you should access your mail via the server.
--- Huh?
Why would someone be so stupid?
If you are ON the server, why would you go through an extra layer of software when you can just grep?
That's the whole point of 'mbox', it it keeps things simple for unix utils.
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On Thursday, 2011-09-08 at 14:11 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
W/mbox, I have 458 mail folders under 29 dirs with 212638 messages dating back to about 1995...**
I don't think what you are describing is mbox.
MBOX: "All messages in an mbox mailbox are concatenated and stored as plain text in a single file"
You don't have to keep all mailbox folders on a single file. Typically we have a file per mail folder.
And doing any such thing is bad. If you have an IMAP server you should access your mail via the server.
One of the advantages of dovecot is that you also can access files directly, and it is happy about it.
- -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. (from 11.4 x86_64 "Celadon" at Telcontar)
On Sun, 2011-08-28 at 02:12 -0700, Linda Walsh wrote:
John Andersen wrote:
On 8/26/2011 8:24 AM, James Knott wrote:
James Knott wrote: I have also used UoW before. Should I be using other than Cyrus? The only reason I went with it is because it was the default imap server install with opensuse 11.4. What about dovecot?
Dovecot gets good reviews. Cyrus seems to work for me just fine. It seems bullit proof. See 6.4 on this page: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Cyrus-IMAP.html 6.4 Adding the default user
I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast....
mbox is fast? I don't believe that for a second. I doubt Dovecot uses mbox; it probably converted the mail to maildir or UoW was already using maildir. mbox is a broken and obsolete mailbox format; and very slow.
On Thu, 08 Sep 2011 23:36:33 +0530, Adam Tauno Williams awilliam@whitemice.org wrote:
mbox is fast? I don't believe that for a second. I doubt Dovecot uses mbox; it probably converted the mail to maildir or UoW was already using maildir. mbox is a broken and obsolete mailbox format; and very slow.
dovecot defaults to maildir but can handle both.
Adam Tauno Williams said the following on 09/08/2011 02:06 PM:
On Sun, 2011-08-28 at 02:12 -0700, Linda Walsh wrote:
[...]
I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast....
mbox is fast? I don't believe that for a second. I doubt Dovecot uses mbox; it probably converted the mail to maildir or UoW was already using maildir. mbox is a broken and obsolete mailbox format; and very slow.
How do you get to that conclusion?
On the one hand dealing with a mbox involves opening two files: index and data. Using index, seek.
On the other maildir requires a dirread, the opening a file and a read.
If its just the one message, then its probably about the same. I you are reading though a logical mail folder reading each message in turn then compare the overhead of file open to the overhead on a seek on an already open file. Maybe that file is cached so there is no syscall.
If I were writing a mail user agent entirely in shell, I'd pick maildir.
Dovecot uses mbox. I have over 200 such mboxes in my mail 'catalogue' and there is a dovecot.index.log, dovecot.index and dovecot.index.cache for each.
I doubt very much that mbox format under Dovecot is slow.
"Obsolete"? Not so long as it is used by all the MTAs and MUAs.
On Thu, 2011-09-08 at 14:47 -0400, Anton Aylward wrote:
Adam Tauno Williams said the following on 09/08/2011 02:06 PM:
On Sun, 2011-08-28 at 02:12 -0700, Linda Walsh wrote:
[...]
I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast....
mbox is fast? I don't believe that for a second. I doubt Dovecot uses mbox; it probably converted the mail to maildir or UoW was already using maildir. mbox is a broken and obsolete mailbox format; and very slow.
How do you get to that conclusion?
Long experience and an understanding of how mbox works.
On the one hand dealing with a mbox involves opening two files: index and data. Using index, seek.
Incorrect; if there is an index it is *not* mbox. It is some extension to mbox; mbox does not specify, describe, or require an index.
On the other maildir requires a dirread, the opening a file and a read. If its just the one message, then its probably about the same. I you are reading though a logical mail folder reading each message in turn then compare the overhead of file open to the overhead on a seek on an already open file. Maybe that file is cached so there is no syscall. If I were writing a mail user agent entirely in shell, I'd pick maildir. Dovecot uses mbox. I have over 200 such mboxes in my mail 'catalogue' and there is a dovecot.index.log, dovecot.index and dovecot.index.cache for each. I doubt very much that mbox format under Dovecot is slow.
Okay. But then it isn't using mbox; it has extended mbox [maybe we can call it mbox+]. If you modify the mbox directly the indexes will be out-of-date.
Adam Tauno Williams said the following on 09/08/2011 02:53 PM:
On Thu, 2011-09-08 at 14:47 -0400, Anton Aylward wrote:
On the one hand dealing with a mbox involves opening two files: index and data. Using index, seek.
Incorrect; if there is an index it is *not* mbox. It is some extension to mbox; mbox does not specify, describe, or require an index.
Ah, I see. The difference between the noun and the verb. You are concerned with the DEFINITION of what a mbox is. I am concerned with how the mbox is being used by the ..
Oh wait, isn't this thread about the performance of Dovecot?
[...] I doubt very much that mbox format under Dovecot is slow.
Okay. But then it isn't using mbox; it has extended mbox [maybe we can call it mbox+]. If you modify the mbox directly the indexes will be out-of-date.
Now why would I want to do that? I thought this thread was about using Dovecot?
I'm using Dovecot as a IMAP server. Its on a remote machine. Not just 'why' but 'how'?
And anyway, even if I could telnet in, disable dovecot, edit a mbox by hand, restart dovecot, log off and return to my MUA, the moment the MUA asks the dovecot server to access that mbox, dovecot will see that its timestamp is later than the index and update the index.
Call it "index on demand"
And hey, how do you think the indexes get built in the first place when converting from courier to dovecot?
This is why dovecot can work with Postfix (or postscript) delivering directly to the mbox rather than using the dovecot-lda
BTDT
This is why you can disable dovecot and go back to using courier, and then switch to dovecot again.
BTDT.
Dovecot is not only fast, its also robust :-)
There's nothing wrong with using maildir, but if you've been using courier and the normal *NIX inbox, then dovecot can be installed without the need to convert to maildir format.
That's a K.I.S.S advantage or many people.
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On Thursday, 2011-09-08 at 14:53 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
Incorrect; if there is an index it is *not* mbox. It is some extension to mbox; mbox does not specify, describe, or require an index.
Almost all implementations of mbox use a separate index. The format is not that strict, it has its limitations as originally invented, so each one adds to it.
Some keep the index in memory, so you do not see it.
Nevertheless, all implementations I tried can share mbox files with one another, because they share the basic definition.
With dovecot in particular, you can directly (ie, outside dovecot, while it is running) alter an mbox file, add or delete a message, and the server will notice it and reindex automatically. It works, I have done it.
- -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. (from 11.4 x86_64 "Celadon" at Telcontar)
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
On Sun, 2011-08-28 at 02:12 -0700, Linda Walsh wrote:
I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast....
mbox is fast? I don't believe that for a second. I doubt Dovecot uses mbox; it probably converted the mail to maildir or UoW was already using maildir. mbox is a broken and obsolete mailbox format; and very slow.
---- Dovecot uses whatever you tell it to use and it's fast w/all of them -- though it has a native format that is probably fastest.
Reality doesn't require your belief.
UoW used mbox as well -- it may ALSO have supported maildir, but I don't recall that it did -- but considering you don't know your definitions, (from previous email), I can't really tell what you are saying.
Dovecot supports a variety of formats:
http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/
how many does Cyrus support? i.e. How compatible is it with other mail systems?
My issues were compatibility, reliability and speed. Dovecot gave me meets or exceeds on all compared to UoW..., Cyrus: fail, unknown, reportedly faster"
The fail was a blocker.
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On Thursday, 2011-09-08 at 14:06 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
mbox is fast? I don't believe that for a second.
It is fast. It depends on what tests you run. For inserting/deleting, maildir can be faster. For searching, mbox is faster.
I doubt Dovecot uses mbox; it probably converted the mail to maildir or UoW was already using maildir. mbox is a broken and obsolete mailbox format; and very slow.
dovecot uses mbox, and other formats. It has its own format, which is a mixture of maildir and mbox. It is your choice what to use.
- -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. (from 11.4 x86_64 "Celadon" at Telcontar)
On Friday 26 August 2011 11:13:39 James Knott wrote:
I'm trying to set up a Cyrus IMAP server. It requires an IMAP password, but I don't see any default or way to set it. What's the secret here?
There are several ways, but the most basic, that doesn't involve using yast and ldap, is described in the README file in the package
Basically, the default authentication is using sasl and it has a way of setting a password
Anders
On Fri, 2011-08-26 at 11:13 -0400, James Knott wrote:
I'm trying to set up a Cyrus IMAP server. It requires an IMAP password, but I don't see any default or way to set it. What's the secret here?
The simples form of authentication is LOGIN/PLAIN; which with Cyrus [or SASL in general] is performed via the saslauthd service. In your /etc/imapd.conf file set/add -
sasl_pwcheck_method: saslauthd sasl_mech_list: PLAIN
And start the saslauthd service - "service saslauthd start"
By default that will authenticate users via PAM; which can be changed via the SASLAUTHD_AUTHMECH setting in /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd
Recent versions of Cyrus IMAP will be virtuously cranky about letting you perform plain text authentication over a unsecure [unencrypted] connection so if you want to do that also add -
allowplaintext: 1
- to your /etc/imapd.conf file.
-
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