Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Steve Litt  writes:

> Hi all,
>
> When I use an email client, its purpose is as a window into my Dovecot
> IMAP, and as a mechanism to reply to and send emails. I don't do
> filtering or calendaring on my email client (filtering via procmail
> direct to Dovecot).
>
> What email clients are all of you using to look at your IMAP email?

Someone's got to mention Emacs and Gnus. I suppose it's unlikely
anyone's going to pick up Emacs just to use the mail client, but it's a
great mail client. Grossly configurable, and handles IMAP accounts well.

Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?

[Joseph Tam]

Steve Litt asks


* And most important, where can I find the best, most unambiguous
 Alpine documentation, that doesn't assume I know anything about
 Alpine?


The ~/.pinerc config file is well documented.  There is a bewildering
number of options, and you can tweak it just about anyway you like.

Choice of mail readers tend to a religious issue.  Users of a particular
reader will only change when you pry their cold dead fingers off of it.

Alpine is not a bad choice (I've been using it and it's predeccesor for
decades), and I go through mail faster than most people I know as I can
type faster than they can click buttons, scroll, and drag windows around.
However, it sort of sucks when you read formatted mail HTML with lots of
graphics).

Joseph Tam 

Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?

[Steve Litt]

On Fri, 18 Nov 2016 08:14:02 -0500
Tanstaafl  wrote:

> On 11/17/2016 10:58 AM, Steve Litt  wrote:
> > I have over 620K emails in over 1000 folders. This turns Thunderbird
> > into an all day affair, just to refresh its caches.  
> 
> There are lots of knobs you can tweak to improve the situation, but
> the bottom line is - 1,000 folders (really?!?), 650,000 emails -
> well... this is going to be a problem for almost any client.

It wasn't a problem for Kmail, before the disastrous conversion to
Kmail2. It wasn't a problem with Claws-Mail (I'm leaving Claws for
non-technical reasons). My experimentation with Alpine indicates that,
at the single folder level, it's not a problem for Alpine: Alpine can
view a huge folder within a couple seconds the first time, instantly
from then on. My (probably temporary) problem with Alpine is finding and
committing to muscle memory tactics to replace my Kmail/Claws chops
that sped my workflow. I might end up using Alpine for my daily
emailing activities, and some other program to act as a sort of "file
manager" for my IMAP server.

I think Steffen Kaiser's last email went a long way toward pointing me
in the right direction in Alpine operations, especially his link to the
IMAP specification. I'll be working with his suggestions over the next
couple days.

And of course I still need to investigate Mutt.

Thanks everyone!
 
SteveT

Steve Litt 
November 2016 featured book: Quit Joblessness: Start Your Own Business
http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz

Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?

[Steffen Kaiser]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On Fri, 18 Nov 2016, Tanstaafl wrote:

On 11/17/2016 10:58 AM, Steve Litt  wrote:

I have over 620K emails in over 1000 folders. This turns Thunderbird
into an all day affair, just to refresh its caches.


There are lots of knobs you can tweak to improve the situation, but the
bottom line is - 1,000 folders (really?!?), 650,000 emails - well...
this is going to be a problem for almost any client.


That is actually the area, in which a non-caching client (pine, mutt) is 
playing well, if there is a stable connection to the server.


Some time ago, I read an article about the following setup:

1) external mail server - no matter which
2) local Dovecot and MTA - actually on some notebook or behind some slow 
link
3) a cron job that performs a two-way sync with the external server, if 
the link available

4) the user works locally only

- -- 
Steffen Kaiser

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Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?

[Tanstaafl]

On 11/17/2016 11:03 PM, li...@lazygranch.com  wrote:
> Comments about the retired TB:
> ‎https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/
> 
> Practically what this means is that in 2016, Thunderbird will finally
> be able to accept donations from users directed toward the update and
> maintenance of Thunderbird. In the long run, Thunderbird needs to
> rely on our users for support, and not expect to be subsidized by
> revenue from Firefox. We welcome this help from the Mozilla
> Foundation in moving toward our goal of developing independent
> sources of income for Thunderbird.

The interesting thing is that Thunderbird has seen a lot more bug fixes
and improvements since Mozilla 'abandoned' development of it than it
ever saw under direct Mozilla 'care'.

There are some uncomfortable pain points coming up (deprecation of
XUL/XPCOM being the main ones), but I'm confident Thunderbird will
emerge victorious, once again.

:)

Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?

[Tanstaafl]

On 11/17/2016 10:58 AM, Steve Litt  wrote:
> I have over 620K emails in over 1000 folders. This turns Thunderbird
> into an all day affair, just to refresh its caches.

There are lots of knobs you can tweak to improve the situation, but the
bottom line is - 1,000 folders (really?!?), 650,000 emails - well...
this is going to be a problem for almost any client.

Re: Generalized looping possible in pigeonhole sieve?

[Darac Marjal]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 02:42:31PM -0800, Jeff Kletsky wrote:
I'm struggling to achieve the kind of filtering with sieve that I was 
able to do with procmail.


A couple of options that I can think of:

If the address is sufficiently like the folder name, you can use sieve's 
regex capabilities. For example, I convert addresses such as 
"user+fol...@example.com" to "Tagged/Folder" using:


	require [ "fileinto", "mailbox", "subaddress", "variables", "regex", 
	"envelope"];


if envelope :detail :regex "to" "(.+)" {
set :upperfirst :lower "detail" "${1}";
fileinto :create "Tagged/${detail}";
stop;
}

Another alternative is, if your map of addresses is complex, but doesn't 
change very often, use a script (such as a Makefile) to generate the 
sieve script from the map. Then, next time you update the map, you 
re-run the script which re-writes the sieve file.





TL;DR

I'd like a way to loop through a set of (address, destination) pairs 
in sieve so that I can maintain the (address, destination) pairs in 
one place and not have to explicitly write scores of nearly identical


[...]

if address :matches ["From", "Sender", "To", "Cc"] "address53" {
   fileinto "destination53"
}

if address :matches ["From", "Sender", "To", "Cc"] "address54" {
   fileinto "destination54"
}

[...]


Longer:

I've been using a table-based dispatch approach with procmail for 
years and it was working reasonably well.


The approach uses list of pairs of address and destination boxes and 
doing a lookup based on the message to be delivered. With procmail, I 
collected the list of addresses and passed them to external scripts to 
do the lookup.


If I just had a dozen boxes that I deal with, that would be 
straightforward to implement and maintain in sieve. As the list is an 
order of magnitude greater than that, maintaining the list of pairs in 
an external file and programmatically looping through it is a lot 
easier.


I've looked at vnd.dovecot.execute and it certainly can return a 
destination box name given the input information.


Unfortunately, the construct of (for example)

address :matches "To" "*"'

only returns the first address, not the list of addresses.

I can't see a good way to get all the addressees from sieve to pass to 
the external program. If I have to pass the message (or at least the 
interesting headers) to the external program and then parse the 
address list myself, then I'm nearly all the way to just using a 
full-on external program to parse the whole message.


While I'm not adverse to writing the whole thing in Python (or the 
like) and just using sieve as a thin shell, I'd like to make sure I'm 
not missing something in sieve.


One way to achieve this would be to be able to loop through the pairs 
and using variable substitution for each iteration. I haven't seen 
anything in Dovecot Pigeonhole sieve that allows this.


If you have any ideas on how to harness sieve for this, I'd appreciate it!


Jeff


--
For more information, please reread.

Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?

[Steffen Kaiser]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On Thu, 17 Nov 2016, Steve Litt wrote:

On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 08:52:11 +0100 (CET)
Steffen Kaiser  wrote:

On Thu, 17 Nov 2016, Steve Litt wrote:


What email clients are all of you using to look at your IMAP
email?


https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_(E-Mail-Programm)

:-)


I installed Alpine and got it to work as a window to my Dovecot IMAP
server, but I could only "import" one mailbox at a time, and as I


actually, Alpine does not cache anything locally, hence, it does not 
import. You select one mailbox and work with it. Then change the mailbox 
using G or L.



* How does one import *all* folders from the Dovecot server at once,
 without repeatedly typing in 192.168.100.2/ssl/user=slitt and all the
 rest of the process?


You add a new collection via S L


* Is there a way of viewing my folder hierarchy hierarchically,
 including collapse and expand?


Not really. L gets you to the collection list, where you enter one 
hierarchie at a time.



* How does one manually expunge an email previously marked for
 deletion? I know it's possible because one config item is "*only*
 expunge manually." Is there a way of expunging ranges of emails?


(Al)Pine is merely a front-end for IMAP, see

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-6.4.3

eXpunge (X) key issues this command:

"The EXPUNGE command permanently removes all messages that have the
  \Deleted flag set from the currently selected mailbox.  Before
  returning an OK to the client, an untagged EXPUNGE response is
  sent for each message that is removed."

Hence, all messages, that have the \Deleted flag, are expunged by X.

"expunge manually" means, that Pine does not expunge a mailbox on exit 
automatically.


In fact, instead of mark many messages as \Deleted, move them somewhere 
else.


Instead of using the Deleted keyword (tag, flag, ...), use another, 
possble self-created keyword, s. 
https://www.washington.edu/alpine/tech-notes/config.html#keywords . Mark 
them, then


;k ENTER
adx

; - select
k - by Keyword
a - Apply (next command to all selected messages)
d - mark as \Deleted
x - eXpunge all messages marked as deleted


* How does one switch the sort order while in the folder list or the
 message list?


You mean $ in the message list?
The folder list is fixed, as far as I know; maybe the global option 
https://www.washington.edu/alpine/tech-notes/config.html#folder-sort-rule 
effects this view. I usully use G to changes folders / mailboxes.



* And most important, where can I find the best, most unambiguous
 Alpine documentation, that doesn't assume I know anything about
 Alpine?


Hmm, http://roqet.org/pine.html Getting started with config
http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/ All About PINE ;-)
https://www.washington.edu/alpine/
https://www.washington.edu/pine/

- -- 
Steffen Kaiser

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Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?

[lists]

I like vi (really vim), but I'm OK with Claws. I do most of my email on a 
BlackBerry. (No, really.)

  Original Message  
From: Patrick Ben Koetter
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2016 12:15 AM
To: dovecot@dovecot.org
Subject: Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?

* li...@lazygranch.com :
> So does mutt suck or not?

If you work with vi and like it, chances are you will also like mutt.

Personally I *love* mutt! No extra fat. Always on the spot. It is "liberal in
what it receives and conservative in how it sends". Since it is command line
program, I can run it almost everywhere.

It supports local mailboxes, SMTP, POP and IMAP as well as S/MIME and PGP.
You can highly customize it, if you want to with rules per folder, per sender
adress etc. pp.

Just like vi it takes a while until you have internalized the (invisible)
interface. Once you've moved beyond that point you will experience an enormous
boost in efficency.

If you want to, ping me offline and I will share my mutt config. That should
make it easier to start using it.

p@rick


>   Original Message  
> From: Andreas Kalex
> Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2016 11:06 PM
> To: Dovecot Mailing List
> Subject: Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?
> 
> since years mutt, 'cause it really sucks. 
> I tried TB or claws, evolution, opera but always returned to mutt. 
> 
> 
> 
> Am 18. November 2016 06:31:43 MEZ, schrieb Steve Litt 
> :
> >On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 18:07:15 -0800
> >li...@lazygranch.com wrote:
> >
> >> FWIW, I use claws, which is about the only one not mentioned. 
> >> 
> >> I don't like Thunderbird. For one thing, it is in caretaker status.
> >> Mozilla believes Web based mail is the "future." I rather not run
> >> roundcube, given I got hacked via an unpatched roundcube  back when I
> >> was using a hosting company. ‎ Webmail just increases your attack
> >> surface. 
> >
> >Thanks.
> >
> >My reason for exploring Alpine is I'm moving away from Claws, for
> >non-technical reasons I won't burden this list with.
> >
> >Thanks,
> >
> >SteveT
> >
> >Steve Litt 
> >November 2016 featured book: Quit Joblessness: Start Your Own Business
> >http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz

-- 
[*] sys4 AG

https://sys4.de, +49 (89) 30 90 46 64
Schleißheimer Straße 26/MG,80333 München

Sitz der Gesellschaft: München, Amtsgericht München: HRB 199263
Vorstand: Patrick Ben Koetter, Marc Schiffbauer
Aufsichtsratsvorsitzender: Florian Kirstein

Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?

[Patrick Ben Koetter]

* li...@lazygranch.com :
> So does mutt suck or not?

If you work with vi and like it, chances are you will also like mutt.

Personally I *love* mutt! No extra fat. Always on the spot. It is "liberal in
what it receives and conservative in how it sends". Since it is command line
program, I can run it almost everywhere.

It supports local mailboxes, SMTP, POP and IMAP as well as S/MIME and PGP.
You can highly customize it, if you want to with rules per folder, per sender
adress etc. pp.

Just like vi it takes a while until you have internalized the (invisible)
interface. Once you've moved beyond that point you will experience an enormous
boost in efficency.

If you want to, ping me offline and I will share my mutt config. That should
make it easier to start using it.

p@rick


>   Original Message  
> From: Andreas Kalex
> Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2016 11:06 PM
> To: Dovecot Mailing List
> Subject: Re: Good email client to use with Dovecot?
> 
> since years mutt, 'cause it really sucks. 
> I tried TB or claws, evolution, opera but always returned to mutt. 
> 
> 
> 
> Am 18. November 2016 06:31:43 MEZ, schrieb Steve Litt 
> :
> >On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 18:07:15 -0800
> >li...@lazygranch.com wrote:
> >
> >> FWIW, I use claws, which is about the only one not mentioned. 
> >> 
> >> I don't like Thunderbird. For one thing, it is in caretaker status.
> >> Mozilla believes Web based mail is the "future." I rather not run
> >> roundcube, given I got hacked via an unpatched roundcube  back when I
> >> was using a hosting company. ‎ Webmail just increases your attack
> >> surface. 
> >
> >Thanks.
> >
> >My reason for exploring Alpine is I'm moving away from Claws, for
> >non-technical reasons I won't burden this list with.
> >
> >Thanks,
> >
> >SteveT
> >
> >Steve Litt 
> >November 2016 featured book: Quit Joblessness: Start Your Own Business
> >http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz

-- 
[*] sys4 AG
 
https://sys4.de, +49 (89) 30 90 46 64
Schleißheimer Straße 26/MG,80333 München
 
Sitz der Gesellschaft: München, Amtsgericht München: HRB 199263
Vorstand: Patrick Ben Koetter, Marc Schiffbauer
Aufsichtsratsvorsitzender: Florian Kirstein
 

Re: Panic: file dsync-brain-mailbox.c: line 814 ...

[Sander Lepik]

17.11.2016 11:01 Sander Lepik kirjutas:
> Hi!
> 
> We have 2 servers replicating each other and after upgrade to 2.2.26.0
> we are seeing this in the logs:
> 
> Primary server:
> 
> Nov 17 09:37:39 mailhost01 dovecot: dsync-server(u...@domain.ee): Panic:
> file dsync-brain-mailbox.c: line 814 (dsync_brain_slave_recv_mailbox):
> assertion failed: (memcmp(dsync_box->mailbox_guid,
> local_dsync_box.mailbox_guid, sizeof(dsync_box->mailbox_guid)) == 0)
> Nov 17 09:37:39 mailhost01 dovecot: dsync-server(u...@domain.ee): Error:
> Raw backtrace: /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(+0x9438e)
> [0x7f3ccceb238e] -> /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(+0x9447c)
> [0x7f3ccceb247c] -> /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(i_fatal+0)
> [0x7f3ccce4ba4e] ->
> dovecot/doveadm-server(dsync_brain_slave_recv_mailbox+0x3d8)
> [0x7f3ccd8f66f8] -> dovecot/doveadm-server(dsync_brain_run+0x650)
> [0x7f3ccd8f4110] -> dovecot/doveadm-server(+0x4143b) [0x7f3ccd8f443b] ->
> dovecot/doveadm-server(+0x5735f) [0x7f3ccd90a35f] ->
> /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(io_loop_call_io+0x4c) [0x7f3cccec6bdc]
> -> /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(io_loop_handler_run_internal+0x10a)
> [0x7f3cccec809a] ->
> /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(io_loop_handler_run+0x25)
> [0x7f3cccec6c65] -> /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(io_loop_run+0x38)
> [0x7f3cccec6e08] -> dovecot/doveadm-server(+0x26b99) [0x7f3ccd8d9b99] ->
> dovecot/doveadm-server(+0x28efc) [0x7f3ccd8dbefc] ->
> dovecot/doveadm-server(+0x3daba) [0x7f3ccd8f0aba] ->
> /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(io_loop_call_io+0x4c) [0x7f3cccec6bdc]
> -> /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(io_loop_handler_run_internal+0x10a)
> [0x7f3cccec809a] ->
> /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(io_loop_handler_run+0x25)
> [0x7f3cccec6c65] -> /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(io_loop_run+0x38)
> [0x7f3cccec6e08] ->
> /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot.so.0(master_service_run+0x13)
> [0x7f3ccce51f53] -> dovecot/doveadm-server(main+0x19f) [0x7f3ccd8ccdef]
> -> /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xf5)
> [0x7f3ccca94b45] -> dovecot/doveadm-server(+0x19ea6) [0x7f3ccd8ccea6]
> Nov 17 09:37:39 mailhost01 dovecot: dsync-server(u...@domain.ee): Fatal:
> master: service(doveadm): child 42621 killed with signal 6 (core dumps
> disabled)

Looking at the logs more deeply we can see that it's pretty sure that it
was automatic full resync causing this error. But if that's the case
then replicator's status is giving wrong info.

It shows that full sync was successful and nothing failed - the process
crashed and there were no more retries in the logs - how can it be
successful?

-- 
Sander