On 5/16/25 11:06 AM, Nikolaos Milas via dovecot wrote:
We are on Dovecot 2.3.18.
Some users are occasionally complaining that all mail vanishes from
their
inbox.
I am on the Debian build 2.3.19.1, and there are outright bugs in that code. I
am doing replication between two servers and I have made my own C source
changes and recompiled to make it work as well as it does—though I can look at
the code and still see clear problems.
I conclude that Dovecot's maintainers decided this code is too broken for them
to try to fix, and so they have pulled the replication feature from 2.4.
In my logwatch e-mail this morning the machine that initiates the replication
had a crash and a stacktrace (much better than what the stock Debian build was
doing, it was reliably blowing up the stack; most days my modified code does
not crash even once).
I am running a small personal site, I do a complete backup of all user maildirs
every night, and keep 15-days worth of backups¹. I do not trust Dovecot.
All public support for 2.3 has ended. I conclude that 2.3 is bad news and users
of 2.3 need to get off 2.3.
There is the current (very recently released) 2.4.
From what I have seen here migrating to 2.4 is tricky, and sometimes 2.4 simply
crashes when it doesn't like some configuration detail. Software that crashes
on a bad config is really unnerving.
And, 2.4 doesn't have replication.
So both 2.3 and 2.4 look bad to me. I need a new IMAP server, and I don't know
what it is.
Someone started writing an IMAP server in Rust a while back². The server is
Stalwart, it might be very good, but it seems to be a complete, all-sing all-
dancing, do-everything solution. I can't drop Stalwart in as a new IMAP server,
I would need to redo everything because Stalwart and its web GUI wants to do
everything. (If I do do Stalwart, what if I discover it has its own problems?
Stalwart isn't as new as 2.4, but the whole thing is pretty new.)
There are other Linux IMAP servers, but they all seem obscure in the face of
Dovecot being the standard everyone uses. Except "everyone" doesn't use e-mail
that much anymore, and when they do use e-mail it is via something like Gmail
and their web GUI. It feels like IMAP itself is getting pretty obscure.
Grrr.
-kb, the Kent who, in using replication, knows he is using an obscure feature
of the (more and more) obscure Dovecot, implementing the (more and more)
obscure protocol IMAP.
1. Using the `--link-dest` option of rsync files that haven't changed from one
incremental backup to the next do not get duplicated, rather both backups will
have hard links to the same data. Not as fast as file systems with snapshot
features, but still very cool.
2. Rust simply could not have the bugs I was seeing in the Dovecot sources, the
compiler would error all over the place on code like that. Yes, the Rust
compiler can be annoying, but once it is happy with code there are legions of
bugs that simply cannot exist.
_______________________________________________
dovecot mailing list -- dovecot@dovecot.org
To unsubscribe send an email to dovecot-le...@dovecot.org
