Never too late for information.
Here's the situation as it stands. The original server is a Centos 3 box, and the new server is a Centos 6 box. They are separate boxes and I can move mail back and forth between the without losing any email (so far).
I've got pop3 and imap logging in, but only retrieving pop email, etc. on the new box. The INBOX points to where sendmail deposits it. My config right now stands at:
mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u protocols = pop3 imap
By switching my test account from pop to imap, I can't get emails. I'm not sure if the info in your link is pertinent yet. But now I'm wondering if I need Namespaces configured.
Both pop and imap use the same INBOX (/var/spool/mail/%u) but imap doesn't seem to honor the above "mail_location). So for now, I'm reading a lot more trying to discover how things aren't working.
Thanks steve
On 2/13/2012 11:18 AM, Scott Silva wrote:
on 2/13/2012 4:35 AM Steve Campbell spake the following:
On 2/12/2012 2:09 PM, Alexander Dalloz wrote:
Am 12.02.2012 20:01, schrieb Steve Campbell:
Actually, I'm having problems with pop and imap.
I changed mailservers this weekend, going from a Centos 3 box to a Centos 6 box. The Centos 3 box used the old standard imap and pop servers. We use horde for our webmail. The pop3 mailboxes (mbox) were in /var/spool/mail and the imap folders were in /home/user/mail, which horde took care of.
So 2 classes of users? As John has annotated, mixing POP3 and IMP4 use is not advised at all.
Not really two classes of users. Most of the users use pop for retrieving email. Horde is our webmail app, and it reads the mailbox, but creates and manages the imap folders in user's home directory. This has worked fine in the past, allowing users to read mail from their desktop using pop, and if desired, using horde to read mail from elsewhere. If they want to be able to see read email from outside the building, they set their mail client to "leave on server". Horde takes care of deleting email from the mbox as well if desired.
Upon starting the Centos 6 box, I ran into tons of login and viewing problems. I tried Cyrus for imap, could log in, but couldn't see mail in the imap folders. Using dovecot for pop, I eventually could get logged in, but kept getting the "couldn't open INBOX" message, so no one could download their email, even though sendmail was delivering it properly.
Cyrus-IMAPd is out of the game unless you do a real mail store migration as Cyrus-IMAPd uses his own storage scheme.
My preference is to use dovecot as both pop and imap servers. The Centos 3 imap server used an rpm named imap-2002d-12 (at least that's the one I have on that server). I'm not sure how "mixing" comes into play here, since most people set their smart phones up as imap clients, and they can still view their email when they arrive at work using pop.
So here's my question:
Can (should) dovecot be used for both imap and pop when considering the above setup of mbox in /var/spool/mail and imap folders in ~/mail? Horde will read the mbox to display new messages in it's screens.
Yes.
That's good to get an opinion. I'm going to proceed thinking dovecot will do both. There's also an issue to address later of shared stuff I'll have to investigate. We have a few accounts that multiple users use in this manner through imap. They log in as a singular user, but there are issues of deletions and the like that sometimes cause problems.
If so, does anyone have a pretty good link to how to make dovecot function using the old Centos pop/imap scheme? Should I try and convert the old mbox files to another format or destination to make this work?
I reviewed that quite a bit during the night. I guess I need to read up on dovecot's definitions, since that INBOX parameter kept throwing me. There really isn't an INBOX to a pop account's mbox, but there is on our imap scheme. So I might have been trying to force the issue.
Thanks for any help. It's been a long night, going on about 14 hours now and I'm just getting the old server back to current until I figure this out.
Not intended to sound smart ass, but changing a production system the way you do without prior testing isn't that clever.
Not taken in any bad way. I had actually tested it pretty well for all the stuff I'm running on it. Sendmail worked as expected. All of the other apps I have running dealing with email worked fine as well. Apps such as MimeDefang, MailScanner, MailWatch, and everything else. I took for granted that pop and imap would work fine since on the old system, they just worked. I had no idea these services had changed so much. So yes, I failed to test the two things that users want most. Egg on my face, for sure.
Thanks for the help, and criticism.
steve campbell
I wish you success.
Thanks.
Steve, I know I'm late to the party, but you are saying your old server was running UWimap ( by the statement of imap-2002d-12)? If so, there is a little bit of work to do in converting old mail if you brought it forward... http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Migration/UW
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos