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Tag - dovecot

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vendredi, octobre 2 2009

Courier to dovecot migration

Par jd le vendredi, octobre 2 2009, 17:03 - Free Software

This week, I've managed to migrate from courier-imap to dovecot at work. I always had a good experience with dovecot, and I still have one.

Dovecot performances are very good in comparison with courier. With that switch, we dropped the CPU usage of the server from 25 % to 10 %, and it's damn faster now. I have no idea why, but I think that it's better written looking at the code, and also that its usage of index files helps a lot.

We got no problem getting things work with public folders either, so the switch was almost painless.

The only problem we had is that Dovecot is too smart for some MUA. Consequently, we hit an 8 years old Mutt bug #969, which I also reported to the Debian BTS as #549204 with a not-well-tested-but-seems-to-work patch.

Thanks to Claws mail, we also found a bug in dovecot 1.2.5, which should be fixed soon. Dovecot upstream is very responsive and that's always something nice to know when you use a free software.

3 commentaires

jeudi, juillet 9 2009

Upgrading to dovecot 1.2: hello Sieve!

Par jd le jeudi, juillet 9 2009, 16:43 - Naquadah Network

Last year, I told you I wanted to use Sieve to filter my mail. I did not switch, because of the lacking implementation of some Sieve features inside Dovecot, my preferred IMAP server.

After that disapointement, I kept my 8 years old mail setup, being fetchmail running on my workstation and throwing the mails in procmail, then using mutt locally to read the maildirs. But that's over.

As I told you yesterday, I got a laptop to replace my workstation. It was not possible to continue using such a mail setup, since my laptop can be offline, and so would be my mails.

So I decided to upgrade Dovecot to 1.2. I used the dovecot-1.2-work Subversion branch of our lovely Debian maintainers, and built a Debian package for Lenny. The upgrade from 1.1 was almost painless, since the configuration file did not change heavily.

Then I started to write my little Sieve script. Sieve is a very nice language. Almost user friendly. So in 20 lines I rewrote all my procmail stuff, matching things like List-Id with regex to put the mails automagically in the right folder. I reconfigured mutt to use IMAP, and it works fine. I even reimported my old Maildir via IMAP using mutt too.

I am now a happy IMAP user.

For people wondering why I wanted to switch away from procmail to Sieve: the reason is that Sieve script can be uploaded remotely via managesieve. This means you do not need FTP/SSH/whatever access to put your script. You can, for example, use connect-sieve or the Sieve plugin for Thunderbird/Icedove.

8 commentaires

dimanche, mai 18 2008

Boarding the Prometheus

Par jd le dimanche, mai 18 2008, 10:26 - Naquadah Network

As I said a month ago, my main server Delmak was dying. Well it still runs (proof: you could read this blog some days ago).

Thanks to friends I host for free, they've kindly given enough money to buy a brand new server (C2D E8400, 4 GB RAM, 2x500 GB RAID 1) in order to replace the good old Delmak. PrometheusThis new box has been named Prometheus after the only BC-303 class battleship ever built.

Delmak was used to mainly run as a Web, mail and databases server. I decided to do use this server switch to change the server software I use.

The first mail server I setup was based on Exim 3, courier-{imap,pop}{-ssl,} with userdb files. That was... rough. Later I switched to Exim 4, using vexim, and MySQL as a back-end. That was something like 3 years ago I guess. Since then I never really touched that back. I added spamassassin and clamav filtering some months after, because some users asked for it. That's all.

So this week, I decided to switch away from this configuration. I do not understand Exim anymore anyway, so I decided to use Postfix which I often use and administrate at work. Obviously, I also now use PostgreSQL as database back-end, since it rocks, and since Postfixadmin supports it. By the way, be aware that the Debian package of postfixadmin is crappy (the configuration file is readable by anyone by default, with the database password in it). I also set up postgrey which is quite nice and efficient.

Well, then was time for amavisd-new installation, but I did not do it. Seriously, amavisd-new configuration is a bloody mess, as the language it is written in (yes, Perl).

So I switched to dspam which I heard is nice. Well, it seems to be for now, since it even supports clamav daemon usage directly, which is very very nice because that means I do not have to set up another thing for that.

I also switched from courier to dovecot, mainly because the latter seems to be faster and lighter. I then changed the default virtual_transport to Dovecot LDA. The main advantage of this is that the LDA updates the Dovecot index while delivering. It also supports quota, which I do not use and plug-ins, like the Sieve language for mail filtering.

So I decided to change my procmailrc to a new Sieve filter. My procmailrc is quite small since I only use regex to match lists and some mail address, so it has only something like 12 rules. And well, I did not do it since I discovered after some googling that Dovecot implementation of Sieve is grabbed from Cyrus which does not support variables for now. That means that the following procmailrc code:

:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-.+@lists.debian.org>
* ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-\/[^@]+
list-debian-$MATCH/

which will translate to:

require [ "regex", "variables", "fileinto" ]
if header :regex "X-Mailing-List" "<debian-(.+)@"
{
    fileinto "lists.debian.${1}";
    stop;
}

But that won't work since Dovecot Sieve implementation does not support "variables". Well, since I'm not ready to list all the lists I'm subscribed to, Sieve is a no-go for now. I'll stick with procmail.

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