Timothy D Legg:
[ Charset ISO-8859-1 converted... ]
> Hello,
>
> Glad to be back here again. I migrated my server to a Raspberry PI and
> away from my aging EeePC netbook that was running Ubuntu Server. I am
> virtual hosting email across a few domains I own using MariaDB to store
> the virtual aliases and virtual user's information. Ultimately, e-mail
> is read within Squirrelmail.
>
> I have to admit, it took a risky path towards configuring (I blindly
> copied the configuration files for Dovecot/Postfix from the old machine).
> Both packages on Raspbian were a downgrade to a lower version number. It
> didn't work. I was due to fly to another country and be offline for
> several days and I had run out of time. Since this only affected my
> email, I decided to table the project during this time.
>
> Upon returning, I found that the problem was that I failed to give the new
> SQL password to Dovecot, so it was impossible for me to authenticate via
> IMAP. Upon fixing that, I was able to log in and see new, very fresh,
> e-mails, but none of the messages from June 9 through June 23 are present.
>
> To further complicate things, I'm using maildir to store the data which
> isn't nearly as user readable as mbox. So I'm not certain where to look
> to find staged e-mail that didn't end up where it was supposed to. Are
> these e-mails still located on my machine somewhere or did they get sent
> down a /dev/null somewhere?
Postfix logs all mail deliveries, successful or not. That will tell
you whether mail was handed off to Dovecot, returned to sender, or
otherwise. Dovecot should produce logs as well.
Absent logs, you may want to run a tool that lists all files with
modification time stamps in the expected time range.
find /some/where -newer file1 -not -newer file2
With file1 and file2 created by suitable instances of "touch -t
YYMMDDhhmm".
Wietse
> In conclusion, this loss of e-mail was an educating experience because
> since the misconfiguration was with Dovecot, I would have expected the
> mail to be there waiting for me once I corrected Dovecot and established
> an IMAP connection. So in the end, I realize that I underestimated how
> intimately Postfix and Dovecot interact with each other.
>
> The upside of all this, I am documenting this on an open-wiki on my
> always-ad-free private site that I can share for peer review in a few days
> once I brush up on the Postfix/Dovecot end of the HOWTO document.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Timothy D Legg
>
>
>
