Courier Mail Server

On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 09:29:41AM +0200, Adrian Snyman wrote:
> We have migrated the majority of our users (250) onto
> a single mailserver with postfix/courier-imap

Version of courier-imap? Obtained from where, or compiled with which
options? Are people using IMAP directly, or is there a webmail frontend? Are
most of your users using the same IMAP client, and if so, what is it?

> However, there is a strange problem that appears under load ...
> People lose their folders .. they are still subscribed, but they are missing 
> in their folder list ..
> 
> I then go into the folder with the problem, delete the file "courierimapacl", 
> and voila .. they become visible again ...

If this is repeatable, and you are running current code, then you could help
debug it.

When a folder is in this state, take a look at the file permissions:

# ls -l courierimapacl

Then 'mv' the file to another location, gzip it, and then post it here as an
attachment. Then we can look to see if its contents make sense.

Also - once you've deleted courierimapacl and the user logs in again, does a
new courierimapacl get created? If so, what does it contain?

If courierimapacl is corrupt, that's one thing. If it contains a valid ACL
which is preventing users from seeing their own folders, then I guess we
need to determine whether a client has actually requested the ACL change, or
if not, how it has become changed.

Regards,

Brian.

On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 04:29:24PM +0200, Roberto Polli wrote:
> > (which could include 
> > TCPREMOTEIP); that could be a fairly major shakeup though.
> shortly:
> can that protocol be changed?
> if so, can that protocol be changed in the way I do?
> or, which is the best way to do this?

Well, clearly it can be changed, as you have demonstrated. The client and
server side code both exist within courier.

However, getting it changed in the mainstream codebase is a matter of
persuading MrSam that it should be done. This is his project, and he's the
only committer. Patches to pass the remote IP address have been submitted
but rejected in the past; but maybe a more general-purpose mechanism might
be considered.

What I'd like to see is that you can specify in the client (e.g. pop3d) a
list of environment variables to be passed across: e.g.

AUTHDAEMON_PASSENV="TCPREMOTEIP,LDAP_FILTER"

Then I'd like to see the four different types of authdaemon request (pre,
authenticate, change password, enumerate) made into the same message format,
which allows the environment variables to be passed. Perhaps this format
should always include a length value so that the other side knows how many
bytes to read in one go, like the existing 'AUTH' message? Or maybe it
should be parsed line-by-line, like the response format? In that case,
requests could be the same format as responses - e.g.

_REQUEST=changepass
_OLDPASS=foobar
_NEWPASS=baz123
TCPREMOTEIP=127.0.0.1
.

Just a thought.

Regards,

Brian.