[CentOS] Dovecot problems

[Steve Campbell]

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.
>
> Alexander
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>
>