Dovecot now 1.x BETA!!!

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Dovecot owner Timo says Dovecot is finally coming out of "alpha" officially - most of the annoying bugs have been worked out.

===============
Do NOT download this or install to a live server - just posted for reference only!
http://dovecot.org/nightly/dovecot-latest.tar.gz
===============

If nothing major is reported, Beta1 will be released tomorrow!

Yipppe!
 
No, I meant the official DA build is alpha5. Since I'm on FreeBSD, I'll probably switch to the port version.
 
From the Dovecot mailing list:

v1.0 is getting nearer and I want people to start looking at Dovecot's
sources. Getting some more help with development would be nice, but I'd
also like to hear if there are any hidden bugs in the code. So, one week
from now I'll start offering 1000 EUR for the first person to point out
a remotely exploitable security hole in Dovecot. See
http://dovecot.org/security.html for more information.

Changes since 1.0alpha5:

UPGRADE WARNING: Unlike earlier Dovecot versions, 1.0 beta1 now requires
Diffie-Hellman parameters to have been generated before SSL/TLS is used.
These are generated when Dovecot is started for the first time and it
may take several minutes. During this time SSL/TLS connections aren't
working.

(I decided to leave it this way at least for now. I don't think any new
Dovecot admins will try to log in with SSL within the first 5 minutes of
the installation?)

Features:

- DSA SSL connections provide now forward secrecy (which causes the DH
parameter issue mentioned above)
- Support for password protected SSL private keys
- LDAP: Added authentication bind support. Patch by J.M. Maurer
- LDAP: Added fast authentication binding. Patch by Geff
<[email protected]>
- PAM: Changed -session parameter to session=yes
- kqueue support. Patch by Vaclav Haisman
- dbox updates. Kind of works now, but not recommended for more than
testing yet. There still are known bugs.
- maildir_copy_with_hardlinks=yes works again
- Sometimes Dovecot kept telling about keyword changes over and over
again even if there weren't any.
- Beginnings of fallbacking to in-memory indexes when write fails with
"out of disk space" error. Not perfect yet, but helps in some cases.
- When IDLEing, send a small notification every 2 minutes so that
NATs/firewalls don't close the connection.
- Added gdbhelper binary to help debugging

Performance improvements:

- Don't fdatasync() cache file. Not that important and gives better
performance.
- mmap_disable=yes mode doesn't keep rewriting index file now
constantly, so it uses much less disk I/O.
- Some other minor index file improvements

Bugfixes:

- UID STORE command wasn't returning UIDs in replies
- Fixes for various problems with IDLE command.
- THREAD command crashed if no search matches were found
- Some fixes to handling LIST command with namespaces. Helps Pine.
- Fixed a situation in mbox when it could get the process to infinite
loop
- Fixed one mbox assert crash
- Use long line wrapping for X-IMAPbase, X-IMAP and X-Keywords headers
for UW-IMAP compatibility
- dovecot --exec-mail wasn't cleaning existing environment variables
properly
 
John's updated the build script.

I used

./build update
./build update_dovecot
./build dovecot
service dovecot restart

on Fedora Core 4 and its worked fine.
 
Wow...The Diffie-Hellman parameters generation takes a long time...

My Bad, dovecot wasn't restarted and the location of the file had changed.
 
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I've noticed the discussions around Dovecot and I was wondering when we will be likely to see it deployed with DA (stable)?

Although on the whole our servers work well with DA, one area of improvement would be email. I'd be keen to see Dovecot (or something other than the current IMAP/POP servers!) in place.

Thanks,
Matthew
 
Beta 3 is out.

http://www.dovecot.org/releases/dovecot-1.0.beta3.tar.gz

List of fixes:
* Dotlock code changed to timeout faster in some situations when
the lock file is old.
+ Added support for loading SQL drivers dynamically (see INSTALL file
for how to build them)
+ Keywords are stored to dboxes, and other dbox improvements.
+ dict-sql could actually work now, making quota-in-sql-database
possibly working now (not fully tested)
+ Added mail storage conversion plugin to convert automatically from
one mailbox format to another while user logs in. Doesn't preserve
UIDVALIDITY/UIDs though.
+ Added plugin { .. } section to dovecot.conf for passing parameters
to plugins (see dovecot-example.conf).
+ Added ssl-build-param binary which is used to generate
ssl-parameters.dat. Main dovecot binary doesn't anymore link to
SSL libraries, and this also makes the process title be clearer
about why the process is eating all the CPU.
- Fix building without OpenSSL
- Fixed memory leak in MySQL driver
- Fixes to checkpassword
- Broken Content-Length header could have broken mbox opening
- Fixed potential hangs after APPEND command
- Fixed potential crashes in dovecot-auth and imap/pop3-login
- zlib plugin now links with -lz so it could actually work
- kqueue fixes by Vaclav Haisman/QUOTE]
 
Dovecot

I just installed Dovecot without any problems at all. I had previously just finished installing Horde with little problems (although I had failed previously). Once Dovecot was installed, Horde just kept working like a charm with not configuration issues.

Now my question is, do people feel dovecot is solid enough to run on a production server? I just got a brand new DA server and I really do NOT want mbox format. I have no conversion problems since I have no current users on the server (although I did have a few test accounts that converted fine). In fact, I have users migrating to this server from a Plesk Maildir box and I'm guessing I will have way less troubles copying over e-mail from Maildir to Maildir than Maildir to mbox.

Do people feel Dovecot is solid enough? Am I writing this in the wrong thread?
 
dovecot 1.0.beta4 released

* Changed the default lock_method back to fcntl. Apparently flock
gives problems with some systems.
* mbox: mailboxes beginning with '.' are now also listed
* Replaced mail_use_modules and mail_modules settings with mail_plugins
and mail_plugin_dir. Now instead of loading all plugins from the
directory, you'll have to give a list of plugins to load. If the
plugin couldn't be loaded, the process exits instead of just
ignoring the problem (this is important with ACL plugin).

+ Added support for "master users" who can log in as other people.
The master username can be given either in authorization ID
string with SASL PLAIN mechanism or by setting
auth_master_user_separator and giving it within the normal username
string.
+ Added ACL plugin with ACL file backend. This however doesn't mean
that there yet exists a proper shared folder support. If master user
logged in as someone else, the ACLs are checked as the master user.
+ Added some Dovecot extensions to checkpassword passdb, see ChangeLog
+ Updated passwd-file format to allow specifying any key=value fields
+ Maildir++ quota support and several quota fixes
+ passdb supporting extra fields: Added "allow_nets" option which takes
a comma separated list of IPs/networks where to allow user to log in.
+ NFS: Handle ESTALE errors the best way we can
+ IMAP now writes to log when client disconnects
+ In shared mailboxes (if dovecot-shared file exists) \Seen flags are
now kept only in index files, so as long as each user has a separate
index file they have separate \Seen flags.
- Fixes to DIGEST-MD5 realm handling so it works with more clients
- BODYSTRUCTURE -> BODY conversion from cache file was broken with
mails containing message/rfc822 parts.
- Fixed several memory leaks
- We could have sent client FETCH notifications about messages before
telling about them with EXISTS
- Compiling fixes for Solaris and some other OSes
- Fixed problem with internal timeout handling code, which caused eg.
outlook-idle workaround to break.
- If /dev/urandom didn't exist, we didn't seed OpenSSL's random number
generator properly. Patch by Vilmos Nebehaj.
- Maildir: Recent flags weren't always immediately removed from mails
when mailbox was opened.
- Several changes to SSL proxying code, hopefully making it work
better.
 
This version has a bug which makes it impossible to use on some systems as users get disconnected right after having logged in.
 
Last edited:
Yes, today 1.0beta5 came out with the bugfix for this when using ssl/tls

Just two changes:

- Beta4's SSL proxying rewrite worked worse than I thought.
Reverted it back to original code.
- Filesystem quota plugin now looks up the mount path correctly.
 
Still not good enough...
The problem we are experiencing has nothing to do with the proxy.

It only happens with connections from localhost.
 
Did not take the time yet, I was browsing the list to see if someone had similar experiences, but it looks like I'll have to subscribe to the list =(...
 
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