On 08 Jan 2016, at 04:27, Bill Shirley <b...@knoxvillechristian.org> wrote:
>
> However, I would think that only applies to mail delivery or POP3/IMAP
> access. Are you saying that all doveadm -A commands will create Maildir and
> 'auto=create/subscribe' folders? Why did it not create
> '~/Maildir/SystemFolders'? I did hit Ctrl-C as soon as I saw what doveadm
> was doing.
>
> Again, I don't think SEARCH should create any directories. Maybe have a
> doveadm CREATE for that purpose? I am not the creator nor a developer of
> Dovecot; just one user with an opinion. If they think this is the correct
> behavior I'm fine with that.
doveadm search doesn't autocreate any folders, but all mail accessing code will
create the mail root directory. Whether that's good or not depends on your use
case. It's safer to always create it though. That guarantees that if there are
configuration mistakes, missing mountpoints or things like that the problem
should get noticed immediately (due to a failing mkdir) rather than an empty
mailbox provided to the user.
I think pretty much the only downside is the situation that you noticed: if
userdb passwd-file is used it contains some users that aren't actually mail
users. But even then not mkdiring would solve the problem only sometimes. You
might want to use doveadm -A parameter for commands that actually modify the
users, and those would still be failing. So I think the proper fix is to just
make sure that -A matches only the actual mail users, which solves the whole
issue. It could be nice to have some feature that allows filtering out specific
users though, besides just having the first_valid_uid filter. Maybe something
in /etc/passwd itself could control whether user would be a mail user or not,
like:
userdb {
driver = passwd
# a) only return users with home directory prefix /home/
#args = include=home=/home/*
# b) don't return users with shell set to /bin/false
#args = exclude=shell=/bin/false
}
