[CentOS] procmail and dovecot

Fri Jun 13 16:50:52 UTC 2014
Jason Pyeron <jpyeron at pdinc.us>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Heinlein
> Sent: Friday, June 13, 2014 12:32
> 
> On Fri, 13 Jun 2014, Chuck Campbell wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 09:14:06AM -0400, Jason Pyeron wrote:
> >>> Does anyone know how to get procmail and dovecot to play happily 
> >>> together with mboxes? I'm on Centos 6.5, fully patched.
> >>>
> >>> I'm getting tons of lock timeouts which is killing performance.
> >>
> >> That is 1 of 2 reasons why we switched to Maildir.
> >
> > What was the second reason? Always looking for 
> justification to take 
> > up the line with my recommendations...
> 
> I can't speak for Jason, but here are some of our reasons for 
> switching to Maildir (which works well with procmail):
> 
>   1. Incremental backups are much smaller
>   2. Large mailboxes aren't a bottle neck

That's it. 15 users, with 20 2GB+ mbox files with a daily change of a 100k+ was
killing our backup effort by having to backup .6TB every day.

And the load on the imap server was through the roof, now it averages a 0.01

> 
> Bruce Schneier recently quipped that sometime around 2006 he stopped 
> filing messages into named folders because e-mail searches became 
> faster than manually sort. Many folks now use e-mail clients with 
> pretty fast search features, so using mailboxes as a sort of 
> filesystem became inefficient -- so mailboxes (particularly the main 
> inbox) get large. Maildir is so much faster in that sort of 
> environment.
> 
> (I'm a dinosaur, still using a CLI mail client, so I still prefer 
> folder-based organization -- but I recognize I'm part of a small and 
> shrinking minority.)
> 
> > Are there any tools to convert procmailrc files to maildir 
> > compatible recipes?
> 
> Changing destination names, and adding closing '/' characters is 
> really all that's needed. E.g.,
> 
>    :0
>    * ^List-Id:.*<centos\.centos\.org>
>    mailinglists/centos
> 
> becomes
> 
>    :0
>    * ^List-Id:.*<centos\.centos\.org>
>    .mailinglists.centos/
> 
> The closing '/' tells procmail to use Maildir.

And we did this in the global procmailrc file:

root at mail ~
# cat /etc/procmailrc
DEFAULT="$HOME/Maildir/"
MAILDIR="$HOME/Maildir/"

User .procmailrc can (but shouldn't) still put in mbox, but the inbox was the
first to go to Maildir.

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