Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
On 3/13/2008, Timo Sirainen ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Mar 6 09:05:48 mercury mail:info imapd[970952]: Killed (lost mailbox lock) user =x host=cpe-24-161-103-11.hvc.res.rr.com [24.161.103.11] Those are UW-IMAP messages! Dovecot doesn't kill connections over a mbox lock. Ouch... so, two different IMAP servers accessing the same mail store? No wonder there are problems... -- Best regards, Charles
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
On 3/13/2008, Scott Silva ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I just tried to do a mass move Define 'mass move'... -- Best regards, Charles
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
You might consider how to direct your needy users to a mail server instance that has Maildir. If you are afraid, or its difficult to wedge this into your current setup, you could have a completely different mail server host their mail, and you could use a MX server and/or a perdition IMAP proxy to redirect them invisibly to this other server once you've moved or copied their data. I wanted to avoid this path and get the migration over with, but I caved in and started going after the power users and the low hanging fruit. I'm very glad I did, because now I can migrate users one at a time and deal with any problems that arise on my schedule, and when I am prepared in the future, I can throw some switches and move the remaining users over that are unrealistic to handhold. Dovecot does fairly decent proxying also. I did my migration from Courier in the same way - configure the new server to take all connections, then proxy them back to the old mail server if they were still on that server. Then wrote a script to move them over one by one and update the DB. Worked very nicely with minimum downtime and you can stop the migration at any point if you find problems (eg mine happened over a month or two...) I needed to get dovecot to change it's CAPABILITY response to match the common abilities between both servers, but apart from that nothing special needed for proxying... Ed W
[Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
The CFO of our college, a most formidable man, had decided to go Blackberry and Something Functional Must Be Done. We've had some users who we've not supported (and things got better for them when we switched from UWIMAP to Dovecot). BB, of course, has their half-baked sorta-IMAP-compliant client (and we do NOT want the BB Enterprise Server) that persistently keeps grabbing the mailbox and breaking the mailbox lock, causing no end of grief for the secretaries (plural, more than one) would also work with the mailbox. 1) Does anyone have recommendations and experience with a genuine BB IMAP client? Googling shows up LogicMail 2) I have been avoiding the plunge in multiple-access mailbox and just let the early BB adapter users thrash but I suppose it is time to do what I can with DC. We are running 1.0.12 with mbox format. Would some kind person grovel,grovel tell me where I should start reading plus any warnings. BB DC experience info would be a big help. Our CFO has a legendary temper and I would like to get as much as possible right the first time out... -- Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
The CFO of our college, a most formidable man, had decided to go Blackberry and Something Functional Must Be Done. We've had some users who we've not supported (and things got better for them when we switched from UWIMAP to Dovecot). BB, of course, has their half-baked sorta-IMAP-compliant client (and we do NOT want the BB Enterprise Server) that persistently keeps grabbing the mailbox and breaking the mailbox lock, causing no end of grief for the secretaries (plural, more than one) would also work with the mailbox. 1) Does anyone have recommendations and experience with a genuine BB IMAP client? Googling shows up LogicMail 2) I have been avoiding the plunge in multiple-access mailbox and just let the early BB adapter users thrash but I suppose it is time to do what I can with DC. We are running 1.0.12 with mbox format. Would some kind person grovel,grovel tell me where I should start reading plus any warnings. BB DC experience info would be a big help. Our CFO has a legendary temper and I would like to get as much as possible right the first time out... My wife has a Blackberry Curve, 8310 (ATT version). I'm running my mailserver on Fedora 8 and the Dovecot is version dovecot-1.0.10- 4.fc8. She is using the built-in IMAP client with SSL and it works just fine. -- Knute Johnson Molon Labe...
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
On Mar 13, 2008, at 12:17 PM, Stewart Dean wrote: The CFO of our college, a most formidable man, had decided to go Blackberry and Something Functional Must Be Done. We've had some users who we've not supported (and things got better for them when we switched from UWIMAP to Dovecot). Probably not what you want to hear, but we scrapped our BB's in favor of iPhone's and haven't had a bit of mail trouble since. IPhones seem to love Dovecot. Maybe buy one and let your CFO play with it for a day or two. He'll make your decision for you :-) B. Bodger New York, NY
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
Sure it will in your situation...but when you have more than one client going after the mailbox, they'll step on each other's work n vanilla Dovecot. And in this case there are at least 2 and as many as 4 or 5 mail clients all open at the same time going after an mbox format inbox. We originally had some Unpleasantness with the unsupported BB users where they left their BBs on at home and came to work and found that they would delete stuff and that it would then come back (their Macs were set to make deleted stuff disappear from the list but not be expunged until they did thatand when the BB popped up from its 5 minute nap and checked the mailbox, it would break the lock and invalidate the work). Those user now do an atomic delete with immediate expunge. And their use was simple compared to the CFO's...would you believe one of his 3 secretaries uses the Trash folder as a secondary storage area? shudder And cannot be talked out of it? Knute Johnson wrote: The CFO of our college, a most formidable man, had decided to go Blackberry and Something Functional Must Be Done. We've had some users who we've not supported (and things got better for them when we switched from UWIMAP to Dovecot). BB, of course, has their half-baked sorta-IMAP-compliant client (and we do NOT want the BB Enterprise Server) that persistently keeps grabbing the mailbox and breaking the mailbox lock, causing no end of grief for the secretaries (plural, more than one) would also work with the mailbox. 1) Does anyone have recommendations and experience with a genuine BB IMAP client? Googling shows up LogicMail 2) I have been avoiding the plunge in multiple-access mailbox and just let the early BB adapter users thrash but I suppose it is time to do what I can with DC. We are running 1.0.12 with mbox format. Would some kind person grovel,grovel tell me where I should start reading plus any warnings. BB DC experience info would be a big help. Our CFO has a legendary temper and I would like to get as much as possible right the first time out... My wife has a Blackberry Curve, 8310 (ATT version). I'm running my mailserver on Fedora 8 and the Dovecot is version dovecot-1.0.10- 4.fc8. She is using the built-in IMAP client with SSL and it works just fine. -- Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
Sure it will in your situation...but when you have more than one client going after the mailbox, they'll step on each other's work n vanilla Dovecot. And in this case there are at least 2 and as many as 4 or 5 mail clients all open at the same time going after an mbox format inbox. We originally had some Unpleasantness with the unsupported BB users where they left their BBs on at home and came to work and found that they would delete stuff and that it would then come back (their Macs were set to make deleted stuff disappear from the list but not be expunged until they did thatand when the BB popped up from its 5 minute nap and checked the mailbox, it would break the lock and invalidate the work). Those user now do an atomic delete with immediate expunge. And their use was simple compared to the CFO's...would you believe one of his 3 secretaries uses the Trash folder as a secondary storage area? shudder And cannot be talked out of it? A large part of the time she has Pegasus running on her desktop too and we've not seen any of these problems. I don't know of any IMAP apps to get for a BB but if you come across a good one, please post a note here. -- Knute Johnson Molon Labe...
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
No. Other than: a) the griping fear of me personally (1 person) migrating 4000 users and b) the recurrent experience of trying to marshal everything necessary to do it, getting about a tenth of the way into *beginning* it and having some 4-alarm fire interrupt things...and then it's a month or two before things calm down again that I might take a shot at it again. These days, I've gotten cynical. I enjoy the peace and quiet for 4 hours to 3 days on the outside whereupon something else falls in the cart that I have deal with. Plus I have to wonder what the realities of moving from 1) mbox with one monster file to 2) maildir with inodes beyond measure and its effect on backup. Yes I know I should be able to just convert one user and find out...but the time isn't there for even that... Fear and Loathing, Sickness unto Death... Remember: when you (the sysadmin) do things really, really right, nobody knows you've done anything. Sounds like a 0 to negative sum game.. Benjamin R. Haskell wrote: Any particular reason you're tied to mbox other than having migrated from UW-IMAP? I suspect maildir, though not as lock-free as advertised, would have a much better time of things. (i.e. it's far better suited for multiple-client access.) -- Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
On Thu, 13 Mar 2008, Stewart Dean wrote: Sure it will in your situation...but when you have more than one client going after the mailbox, they'll step on each other's work n vanilla Dovecot. And in this case there are at least 2 and as many as 4 or 5 mail clients all open at the same time going after an mbox format inbox. Doctor, it hurts when I do $foo. Then stop doing it! Is there a reason you're hurting yourself by using mbox? -- Asheesh. -- Deadwood, n.: Anyone in your company who is more senior than you are.
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
so far: LogicMail...V0.4.0 (not even V1.x, but O.x...is this beta?) http://www.logicprobe.org/proj/logicmail http://www.berryreview.com/2007/10/30/faq-alternative-3rd-party-email-applications-for-blackberry/ http://www.berryreview.com/2007/08/22/logicmail-free-imap-pop3-client-for-blackberry/ in beta, Tiggit http://www.berryreview.com/2008/02/15/tiggit-beta-another-3rd-part-email-client-for-blackberry/ Knute Johnson wrote: I don't know of any IMAP apps to get for a BB but if you come across a good one, please post a note here. -- Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
On Thu, 13 Mar 2008, Stewart Dean wrote: Plus I have to wonder what the realities of moving from 1) mbox with one monster file to 2) maildir with inodes beyond measure and its effect on backup. With reasonable average email usage patterns (averaging =4K/message -- not hard to do with the occasional 5-10MB message), you'll run out of disk space long before running out of inodes on any reasonable filesystem. And, I'd think many tiny files would scale better for backup software. (Depending on how 'dumb' the software doing it is, I'd think minor change to one huge file would be less-efficiently stored than new tiny file or deleted tiny file.) [...] Remember: when you (the sysadmin) do things really, really right, nobody knows you've done anything. Sounds like a 0 to negative sum game.. Amen to that. Especially when it comes to something like email, where even the slightest interruption is intolerable. But, by the same token, it sounds like your experience with BB+mbox is already moving you toward the negative (secretaries already noticed something wrong). Might be worth the effort to try it out with the BB users. Best, Ben
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
so far: LogicMail...V0.4.0 (not even V1.x, but O.x...is this beta?) http://www.logicprobe.org/proj/logicmail http://www.berryreview.com/2007/10/30/faq-alternative-3rd-party-email-applications-for-blackberry/ http://www.berryreview.com/2007/08/22/logicmail-free-imap-pop3-client-for-blackberry/ in beta, Tiggit http://www.berryreview.com/2008/02/15/tiggit-beta-another-3rd-part-email-client-for-blackberry/ Knute Johnson wrote: I don't know of any IMAP apps to get for a BB but if you come across a good one, please post a note here. LogicMail looks interesting but it won't do StartTLS which I need. My setup uses mbox and I haven't seen any problems with multiple clients. What is the problem that I should be having? Thanks, -- Knute Johnson Molon Labe...
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
It's been a while so I don't have the logs any more except for what was in my Sent folder As an example of what I am talking about, here is BB polling every 15 minutes in the maillog: Mar 5 03:06:09 mercury mail:info imapd[2085096]: Login user=sshore host=bda037. bis.na.blackberry.com [216.9.249.37] Mar 5 03:06:09 mercury mail:info imapd[2085096]: Logout user=sshore host=bda037 .bis.na.blackberry.com [216.9.249.37] Mar 5 03:20:39 mercury mail:info imapd[2961602]: Login user=sshore host=ten003. bis.na.blackberry.com [216.9.249.252] Mar 5 03:20:48 mercury mail:info imapd[2961602]: Logout user=sshore host=ten003 .bis.na.blackberry.com [216.9.249.252] and here are some clients fighting over the lock Mar 6 09:05:48 mercury mail:info imapd[970952]: Killed (lost mailbox lock) user =x host=cpe-24-161-103-11.hvc.res.rr.com [24.161.103.11] Mar 6 09:08:04 mercury mail:info imapd[844000]: Killed (lost mailbox lock) user =x host=[10.40.70.71] Mar 6 09:08:18 mercury mail:info imapd[2547784]: Killed (lost mailbox lock) use r=x host=cpe-24-161-103-11.hvc.res.rr.com [24.161.103.11] All I know is that I had some moderately important people screaming at me (I even heard the word useless) that the mail service was %^$#ed up. That after I made it dianetically clear (took 2 weeks) to them that there Must Only Ever Be One Mail Client Open At A Time, they no longer had problems. Scott Silva wrote: on 3-13-2008 11:14 AM Knute Johnson spake the following: so far: LogicMail...V0.4.0 (not even V1.x, but O.x...is this beta?) http://www.logicprobe.org/proj/logicmail http://www.berryreview.com/2007/10/30/faq-alternative-3rd-party-email-applications-for-blackberry/ http://www.berryreview.com/2007/08/22/logicmail-free-imap-pop3-client-for-blackberry/ in beta, Tiggit http://www.berryreview.com/2008/02/15/tiggit-beta-another-3rd-part-email-client-for-blackberry/ Knute Johnson wrote: I don't know of any IMAP apps to get for a BB but if you come across a good one, please post a note here. LogicMail looks interesting but it won't do StartTLS which I need. My setup uses mbox and I haven't seen any problems with multiple clients. What is the problem that I should be having? Thanks, So am I. The only time I had a problem is if multiple programs are trying to access the mbox file directly at the same time. As long as the multiple clients all go through dovecot, I don't have any problems. In fact, I often leave an instance of thunderbird running over my mailstore at my main office, and will hit the same store from my lappy, or from my other office. I have also had thunderbird and outlook running on the same machine looking at the mailstore while I try and reproduce an error that one of my users is having, and although it can sometimes slow down a bit, I don't see any problems. -- Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
on 3-13-2008 12:02 PM Stewart Dean spake the following: It's been a while so I don't have the logs any more except for what was in my Sent folder As an example of what I am talking about, here is BB polling every 15 minutes in the maillog: Is your dovecot version fairly current? This looks like some of the problems I saw in the betas. -- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
Stewart Dean wrote: and here are some clients fighting over the lock Mar 6 09:05:48 mercury mail:info imapd[970952]: Killed (lost mailbox lock) user =x host=cpe-24-161-103-11.hvc.res.rr.com [24.161.103.11] Mar 6 09:08:04 mercury mail:info imapd[844000]: Killed (lost mailbox lock) user =x host=[10.40.70.71] Mar 6 09:08:18 mercury mail:info imapd[2547784]: Killed (lost mailbox lock) use r=x host=cpe-24-161-103-11.hvc.res.rr.com [24.161.103.11] All I know is that I had some moderately important people screaming at me (I even heard the word useless) that the mail service was %^$#ed up. That after I made it dianetically clear (took 2 weeks) to them that there Must Only Ever Be One Mail Client Open At A Time, they no longer had problems. We have some users that caused this too on uw-imap with mbox, they would get frustrated that deleted mail would come back as well. I'm happy to say that Maildir with dovecot handles this extremely well, even on NFS with multiple servers in dovecot 1.1 since one of the later betas. You might consider how to direct your needy users to a mail server instance that has Maildir. If you are afraid, or its difficult to wedge this into your current setup, you could have a completely different mail server host their mail, and you could use a MX server and/or a perdition IMAP proxy to redirect them invisibly to this other server once you've moved or copied their data. I wanted to avoid this path and get the migration over with, but I caved in and started going after the power users and the low hanging fruit. I'm very glad I did, because now I can migrate users one at a time and deal with any problems that arise on my schedule, and when I am prepared in the future, I can throw some switches and move the remaining users over that are unrealistic to handhold.
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
I didn't field DC until 1.0 and have kept pretty much up to date...these problems were present with UWIMAP but got somewhat better since the switchover to DC. I can't imagine how DC could deal with two clients working on the same mbox inbox, where the first instance has changes that are local to the PC and not yet put on the server without DC breaking the lock of the first instance (and thus invalidating the incomplete changes on the PC) and giving it to the second...or is there some magic? Scott Silva wrote: on 3-13-2008 12:02 PM Stewart Dean spake the following: It's been a while so I don't have the logs any more except for what was in my Sent folder As an example of what I am talking about, here is BB polling every 15 minutes in the maillog: Is your dovecot version fairly current? This looks like some of the problems I saw in the betas. -- Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
on 3-13-2008 12:58 PM Stewart Dean spake the following: I didn't field DC until 1.0 and have kept pretty much up to date...these problems were present with UWIMAP but got somewhat better since the switchover to DC. I can't imagine how DC could deal with two clients working on the same mbox inbox, where the first instance has changes that are local to the PC and not yet put on the server without DC breaking the lock of the first instance (and thus invalidating the incomplete changes on the PC) and giving it to the second...or is there some magic? I just tried to do a mass move on a mailbox with thunderbird, and tried to access the same box with outlook and it just took a little while to show up, then refreshed the headers and showed the deleted messages marked as deleted. And nothing unusual in the logs. Strange. Scott Silva wrote: on 3-13-2008 12:02 PM Stewart Dean spake the following: It's been a while so I don't have the logs any more except for what was in my Sent folder As an example of what I am talking about, here is BB polling every 15 minutes in the maillog: Is your dovecot version fairly current? This looks like some of the problems I saw in the betas. -- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
Scott Silva wrote: on 3-13-2008 12:58 PM Stewart Dean spake the following: I didn't field DC until 1.0 and have kept pretty much up to date...these problems were present with UWIMAP but got somewhat better since the switchover to DC. I can't imagine how DC could deal with two clients working on the same mbox inbox, where the first instance has changes that are local to the PC and not yet put on the server without DC breaking the lock of the first instance (and thus invalidating the incomplete changes on the PC) and giving it to the second...or is there some magic? I just tried to do a mass move on a mailbox with thunderbird, and tried to access the same box with outlook and it just took a little while to show up, then refreshed the headers and showed the deleted messages marked as deleted. try the same while receiving mail... also trying moving messages one at a time, not a mass move. And nothing unusual in the logs. Strange. (The mbox) size may matter... Usage too. I've already seen mbox files being corrupted.
Re: [Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed
On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 15:02 -0400, Stewart Dean wrote: Mar 5 03:06:09 mercury mail:info imapd[2085096]: Login user=sshore host=bda037. bis.na.blackberry.com [216.9.249.37] .. Mar 6 09:05:48 mercury mail:info imapd[970952]: Killed (lost mailbox lock) user =x host=cpe-24-161-103-11.hvc.res.rr.com [24.161.103.11] Those are UW-IMAP messages! Dovecot doesn't kill connections over a mbox lock. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
