how to have spam assasin enabled by default?

[nobaloney]

I'm not sure what you mean? Aren't you the provider in this case?

A while back when Dovecot was still in beta this might be understandable; at the moment it appears to be an excellent pop/imap daemon.

Jeff

 

[tlchost]

I'm not sure what you mean? Aren't you the provider in this case?

I rent the box with DA and the bandwidth from a provider. I have a fully managed server, so when someone say "you're on your own" if you switch to dovecot, I take that as meaning I'll get no support.....and you know that I soak up support like a sponge.

 

[smtalk]

Dovecot is officially supported by DirectAdmin.

 

[nobaloney]

To comment further on smtalk's response, Thom, if your provider won't support Dovecot with DirectAdmin, then that's got to be between you and your provider.

I've chosen to no longer even support mbox in my copies of SpamBlocker, version 3 and greater, and if it were up to me, I'd say that DirectAdmin should make the change mandatory.

Of course JBMC staff may differ and of course they may decide to backport mbox into new versions of SpamBlocker or no longer use SpamBlocker technology in DirectAdmin.

Jeff

 

[floyd]

I am of the opinion "if it ain't broke don't fix it."

I have hundreds of customers all using vm-pop3d. I have had no complaints from any of these customers. Why should I go to the trouble of switching to something else that is going to be hardly noticeable by the vast majority of at least my customers?

If a vps customer or dedicated server customer wants to use Dovecot for some reason, in my case they are "on their own" simply because I have never converted to Dovecot before. I am not going to experiment with converting to something, anything, on a production server.

If DA starts installing Dovecot by default then I will start using it.

I was just looking at the Knowledgebase for converting to Dovecot.

It says "Take a few days to ensure that everything is working correctly. Once satisfied, you can remove the old mbox files"

Do the old mbox files get converted to Dovecot as well? If they don't then how do people access the old mbox files? Sometimes people leave mail on the server for a ver long time. Will that mail be gone?

What files does the mail get written to using Dovecot? Does the exim.conf file have to be changed?

It seems there is some, possibly vital, information missing from the Knowledgebase.

 

[smtalk]

Yes, they do

"Take a few days to ensure that everything is working correctly. Once satisfied, you can remove the old mbox files"

That's written just in case something went wrong. I've never had any problems with conversation process. Exim.conf is patched automatically, you don't need to do anything. CustomBuild includes Dovecot by default and it does everything for you (no additional changes needed), if you have dovecot=no and you want to enable it - just set dovecot=yes and run "./build dovecot", that's it

 

[floyd]

So if mail is not stored in /var/spool/mail/virtual anymore then where is is stored? If I am going to "support" something then I have to know what its doing.

Exim.conf is patched automatically

I don't like anything being done automatically without at least telling what was done.

Is vm-pop3d automatically stopped and taken out of the bootup sequence? Same with imapd?

And why is Dovecot better? I have not seen any problems with vm-pop3d and imapd. Any good reasons for changing other than Spamblocker3? I have not read every single post but I have seen a lot of references to converting but not many as to why one should convert.

Is there a faq that tells me all of this?

 

[nobaloney]

So if mail is not stored in /var/spool/mail/virtual anymore then where is is stored? If I am going to "support" something then I have to know what its doing.

This has been documented in the forums; perhaps elsewhere as well; I'm not sure.

Mail is store in two locations:

Subdirectories of /home/USERNAME/Maildir for server accounts.

Subdirectories of /home/USERNAME/imap (okay, it's a bit of a misnomer) for virtual accounts.

I don't like anything being done automatically without at least telling what was done.

How did you ever get DirectAdmin installed ?

Make a copy of your exim.conf file before you run the conversion and then do a diff afterwards.

Is vm-pop3d automatically stopped and taken out of the bootup sequence? Same with imapd?

Yes.

And why is Dovecot better? I have not seen any problems with vm-pop3d and imapd.

vm-pop3d and imapd both use only mbox files; they work relatively well with small inboxes and in the case of imap for small folders, but in the case of larger ones, you can have problems as each time an email is downloaded, saved, or moved between folders (imap) the entire file has to be rewritten which can take time. In the case of large enough folders and/or inbox it can even bring the system to it's knees or fail. mbox also requires a locking file; email cannot be received while the inbox is open. Individual emails are harder to find from the command line, and even harder to manage. And because of the way files are delimited, if an email includes a line beginning with the word From , exactly as shown, beginning with a capital F and followed by a space, the line will be escaped with a > character.

Any good reasons for changing other than Spamblocker3? I have not read every single post but I have seen a lot of references to converting but not many as to why one should convert.

See above.

Spamblocker may not be a reason to convert; After SpamBlocker 3 is released DirectAdmin may decide to backport it to use mbox, or may abandon it altogether.

Is there a faq that tells me all of this?

I don't think so.

Jeff

 

[floyd]

How did you ever get DirectAdmin installed

I guess I should say I don't like things being done automatically on a production server. I have had things get broken before. One example was using custombuild. It wasn't the fault of custombuild. But I had a special situation that it broke and had I asked a bunch of questions beforehand it I would have been better prepared for the result and knew what to do to fix the problem.

But after DA was installed I took about a month and learned everything I could about it before I started using it on a production server.

I don't believe in upgrading on a production server unless there is a very good reason.

I now know what to do if I have a problem with the mail. I might try it out on a test server soon.

Thanks.

 

[nobaloney]

I fully understand, Floyd. We had some problems with our first conversions to custombuild as well.

But Dovecot is a very different beast. And it works in every situation we've set it up. We've always been able to delete the old mailboxes without incident.

We've even learned how to manage conversions that somehow break in the middle (for example if either the 'net connection or the server itself fail.

Jeff

 

[Chrysalis]

I have updated various servers to dovecot, all worked except one, on the one server the owner had some strange problems in thunderbird using imap which I couldnt reproduce. Problems like unable to move emails, when deleted were not actually deleted just marked as deleted, and moving them to other folders like a read messages folder. He is the only person who has given any complaints tho so on the whole dovecot seems reliable. I think it is in DA's interest to move to dovecot only as then they reduce the need to support 2 different systems.