[Mimedefang] OT: Anyone here use Dovecot imap server in production evironment?

Rich West Rich.West at wesmo.com
Fri Apr 8 21:57:51 EDT 2005


> In my initial evaluations of Dovecot and Cyrus, I did learn that 
> Dovecot isn't truly ready for prime time just yet.. at least, not with 
> the version I downloaded (I'm planning on trying again soon, though, 
> as UW is painful in its delays).


Ok.. I take that back.. Dovecot 0.99.13 and above are ready for prime time.

Our environment makes heavy use of procmail, the storing the inbox local 
to the user's home directory rather than a shared store, an inconsistent 
storage location for mail (some users have a subfolder which is the root 
of all of their mail, some don't), and the use of IMAP subscriptions 
(.mailboxlist).  Dovecot takes a little tweaking in order for it to work 
in a similar fashion as UW's.

Most specifically, I found that the "default_mail_env" directive in 
dovecot.conf has to be exactly what you want it to be.

In our case, "default_mail_env = mbox:~/:INBOX=%h/mbox" worked fine in 
addition to renaming all .mailboxlist files to .subscriptions.

Dovecot takes a little extra tweaking to get it to run with xinetd, but, 
after some analysis, there really is little benefit to running dovecot 
out of xinetd if the server gets a fair amount of traffic (imap/pop 
traffic, that is).  Running it standalone is just fine.

In comparison to UW, dovecot cruises through mailboxes. :)

Our environment is now sendmail + mimedefang + procmail + spamassassin 
on the delivery side, and dovecot on the user access side. :)

-Rich



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