Chuck McManis wrote:
On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 8:44 AM, William Blunn
<[email protected]<bill%[email protected]>
wrote:
Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Wed, 2010-06-16 at 08:28 -0700, Chuck McManis wrote:
Jun 16 08:22:07 eeebox dovecot: pop3(cmcmanis): Error: user cmcmanis:
Initialization failed: Initializing mail storage from mail_location
setting
failed: mbox: mbox root directory can't be a file: /home/cmcmanis/Mailbox
(
http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailLocation/Mbox)
..
Now it strikes me that this message indicates that Dovecot is confused
about
how mail is delivered on my system and is looking for a Maildir
implementation when I"m using single files.
No, it's looking for a directory containing mbox files. See the wiki URL
and "Only /var/mail/ mboxes" section in it.
One wonders if Chuck's stated requirement may be reasonably served by
something like this:
mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=~/Mailbox
and create a directory "mail" in each user's home directory.
This should then make Dovecot consider each user's INBOX to be an
mbox-format file at "~/Mailbox", and also allows Dovecot to keep
indexes in
the directory "~/mail", thereby enabling Chuck's users to take
advantage of
Dovecot's indexing functionality.
Fascinating, that gets it further, it creates a bunch of stuff in
mail/.imap (which is confusing because I really really don't want IMAP
and have removed IMAP from the protocols served and the ports listened
on etc)
Then it complains that it can't do an fcntl on Mailbox. It said
'operation not supported.'
Strange. Perhaps there is a problem locking the mbox file using fcntl.
Though I would be surprised if this were the case on a modern filesystem
on a modern unix-like OS.
If you can't use fcntl then you may be limited to using dotlocks (see
http://wiki.dovecot.org/MboxLocking), though you would also need to
determine with certainty that your MTA was using a compatible locking
strategy --- don't skip this step unless you want to be spending 105% of
your time firefighting weekly trouble reports of users complaining that
their mailboxes are scrambled.
Though, if getting reliable locking on mbox is proving expensive, you
might find your overall cheapest solution is to switch to Maildir. With
mbox you have to be careful and work hard to make sure your various
software components cooperate on mailbox locking and even silly things
like mbox format variants (does it escape "From" or not?), and it is
almost impossible to be certain that both the MTA and POP3 system are
going to cooperate perfectly and not scramble mailboxes occasionally.
With Maildir, everything works out-of-the-box with no configuration
without breaking a sweat; mailbox corruption is simply designed-out.
Bill
