On 18 September, 2013 - Charles Sprickman wrote: > I've been using Dovecot in some fresh installs lately and have found > it fairly easy to configure. However I'm starting on a migration > that involves moving from some very old software (ancient vpopmail, > qmail and Courier). > > On the Courier front, I've reviewed the migration page in the wiki, > and it looks like the main concerns are just matching the namespace > and then using the migration script to create new subscription and > uidlist files. Given that my Courier IMAP setup is so old (4.0.6), > is there anything to be aware of that's not covered in the wiki due > to the age of Courier here? > > Are there any other general issues to be aware of as far as > interactions with MUAs are concerned? For example, if Courier has > been presenting the user's MUA with a given set of IMAP capabilities > and then the MUA sees a bunch of extra capabilities on a subsequent > login, will that trigger any strange behavior? > > And lastly on this subject, I will obviously be doing some testing > before cutting over to the other server. Is it valid in something > like Thunderbird to have it pointed to "imap.domain.com" and then > change the imap server to point to something like > "testimap.domain.com" for testing whether subscriptions and the > uidlists are working as expected or should I fully replicate the > move as an end user would see it by making the change in my local > hosts file? > > Now, assuming that portion of the move goes alright, I'm incredibly > confused about getting Dovecot and Vpopmail working together. I > assume that initially I can stick with the Maildir++ mailbox format > and let vpopmail's vdelivermail continue working as my LDA - > vdelivermail understands how to find the user's Maildir, it can > check quotas, and it can update the maildirsize file (which I'm > assuming dovecot can also read and then report quota/usage to an > IMAP client). However it does look like the Dovecot-only mailbox > format(s) will offer much better performance than Maildir as the two > dbox formats are the only supported mailbox formats with separate > index files, correct? Is there any guidance on how to use dovecot's > LDA with a virtual mail system such as vpopmail? From what I've > read so far, I probably don't want to use the vpopmail extension > supplied with dovecot, but query the mysql vpopmail db directly. > I'm finding a ton of info while searching for this, but most deals > with older versions of dovecot, and there are also many "this works > but I don't know why" tutorials on combining dovecot and vpopmail > and dovecot's own LDA. I'm not even able to guess how one handles > the per-user .qmail files in vpopmail if not using vdelivermail > (this is where we enable/disable spam filtering by piping the > message through spamc). > > Any input on the overall migration process is appreciated. It's a > bit overwhelming as I have to deal with a big jump in the vpopmail > version, rebuilding qmail with a ridiculous number of patches, and > then on top of that a migration to new imap/pop server software. > eek.
Hi Charles! I can share some of my war-stories about qmail/vpopmail. Along time ago i ran quite a few qmail/vpopmail/courier/ezmlm/qmailadmin clusters and back then i thought it was the only rely good way of running it. Then the years passed and when i needed to add patches to qmail consisting of more code than qmail started out with it got quite frustrated. Due to speed and scalability we didn't run with a db-backend for vpopmail, we used vpasswd/cdb(?) hash-files and that ran quite well. So when it was time to migrate i came up with the following solution: I ran postfix as smtp-server, querying vpopmail via a tcp:-maps to a daemon written in perl, that ran diffrent vpopmail-commands. That old daemon is now available at: https://github.com/glance-/postfixvpopmail/ For some reason that i can't really remember vdelivermail was just incapable of being used in this case to deliver mail, i think it had something to do with .qmail-files and might have bin something with ezmlm, so i used qmail as a lda, and had postfix pipe mail to qmail-inject. This way we kept qmailadmin/ezmlm running as they did before and just replaced the world-facing components. On top of that i ran Dovecot with the vpopmail plugin. This was a realy old dovecot, probaby like 1.0.x or something, but everything worked smoothly. I just followed the notes on the wiki about uidl-format and no users noticed. I actually just checked, and that server is still running strong, and handling mail for a couple of k users, so it couldn't bin that bad design =) Btw. Its still running Debian Sarge =) I hope you might have gotten some ideas about what to do with a old qmail/vpopmail install. //Anton -- Anton Lundin +46702-161604
