[CentOS] Dovecot problems

Mon Feb 13 16:18:18 UTC 2012
Scott Silva <ssilva at sgvwater.com>

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?
>> See http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailLocation
>
> 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