Respectfully, I would like to ask: please do not remove replication, please
rethink this.

Currently, replication is my life saver. I run two postfix/dovecot combos (on
different operating systems), with dovecot synchronising via replication. Both
are behind a HAProxy running on the router (OPNsense), one as active, one as
backup.

If one of the two fails, the other takes over, and when it comes up again
everything works fine and is up to date. I have had these kinds of system
failures (very hard to find and turned to be hardware related) and it was the
replication that made me survive the issues (even when I was far away from my
systems). Mail for my small group of users (about 8) never went down, no mail
message was ever lost, no manual interventions to sync were ever needed.

If I want to create the same level of availability without replication, I need
those two dovecots to use shared (NFS cluster) storage. But then, I have
another single point of failure (NFS storage) again. So, I need two separate
NFS machines that synchronise, Apart from the nightmare of making NFS secure,
it means that I need to double my hardware (from two systems to four) to be
protected against hardware failure (which is my goal).

The replication service is the perfect small scale solution. Together with
HAProxy, it enables HA in the most simple and effective way. Going the 'NFS
cluster' route is not feasible for me, so if replication is removed and I am
forced to upgrade, I will lose HA.

So please, take small scale users like me into account.

Gerben Wierda (LinkedIn, Mastodon)
R&A_IT_Strategy (main site)
Book: Chess_and_the_Art_of_Enterprise Architecture
Book: Mastering_ArchiMate
YouTube_Channel

     On 16 Jul 2023, at 18:54, Aki Tuomi via dovecot <dovecot@dovecot.org>
     wrote:

     Hi!

     Yes, director and replicator are removed, and won't be available for
     pro users either.

     For NFS setups (or similar shared setups), we have documented a way
     to use Lua to run a director-like setup, see

     https://doc.dovecot.org/3.0/configuration_manual/howto/
     director_with_lua/

     Regards to replication, doveadm sync is not being removed. So you can
     still run doveadm sync on your system to have a primary / backup
     setup.

     Aki

          On 16/07/2023 18:34 EEST William Edwards via dovecot
          <dovecot@dovecot.org> wrote:


          Top posting because nothing specific to reply to, sorry.
          Not exactly sure, but there’s another thread about the
          removal of Director in favour of Dovecot Pro on 3.x.
          Perhaps this change is related.

          William Edwards

               Op 16 jul. 2023 om 16:33 heeft Daniele
               <da...@kernel-panic.it> het volgende geschreven:

               Hello,

               Just like Vladimir, I'm a bit concerned about
               this change, and I'd really appreciate if someone
               could let us know if the replication feature
               (that works so well!) will be replaced or
               removed; and, in case of removal, what would be
               recommended replacement?
               Thanks in advance and best regards,
               Daniele

                    On 09-Jul-23 9:36 PM, Vladimir Mishonov
                    via dovecot wrote:
                    Hello everyone.

                    Just saw this commit in the official
                    Github repo:

                    https://github.com/dovecot/core/commit/
                    4c04e4c30fd4817a8b0e11d04d9681173f696f41#diff-
                    
5f643d8b0d1eea65d0f3c749d14d42b25a9d60f0f149bface862f5ff348412c8


                    Looking at the commit details, it
                    appears that it completely removes the
                    replication feature. I'm a bit
                    perplexed by this change and am not
                    sure what might be the justification
                    for it. Personally, I find replication
                    to be very useful, as it allows me to
                    maintain a synchronized mirror of all
                    of my mailboxes on my home server, for
                    use as backup in case the primary
                    server goes down for some reason.

                    Perhaps there's some sort of
                    replacement being planned for this
                    feature? Or maybe the relevant code is
                    simply going to be refactored to a
                    plugin or external program, and there's
                    nothing to worry about at all?

                    In any case, I'd greatly appreciate if
                    one of the developers could comment on
                    this change.


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