Comments on: DAIMI Mail System Upgraded

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:36:47 +0000

Okay, that would be great! I really hate the procmail language, and the maildrop language (which I use now) is also quite fragile. The examples I have seen of Sieve looks better plus there are many tools for it. So I’m looking forward to it!

By: Rune B. Broberg

Rune B. Broberg — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:57:28 +0000

Short reply: RFC3028. :-)

By: Martin Geisler

Martin Geisler — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:45:13 +0000

Thanks for the answers! I think Cyrus will be fine -- from what I could find, people compare it with Dovecot in terms of performance, so that is cool.

However, I'm very sorry to hear that you will stop supporting ~/.forward files. How are we to (asynchronously) sort our mails then?

I also spam filter everything a second time since the default filter fails to catch about 10 SPAM mails a day for me. Unless the new mail system is way better at catching SPAM, I guess I will have to move to some other system.

By: Rune B. Broberg

Rune B. Broberg — Thu, 08 May 2008 08:29:31 +0000

Lots of questions there ;-) Answers follow:

The new server will be a Cyrus/Postfix setup.

I don't know what amount of evaluation went on with Dovecot, but I know we did some tests of it at some point.

~/.forward-files won't be supported, in the sense that you won't have access to the file system any more :-) You can set up mail-forwarding if you like, but the only access to the mail system will be IMAP(S).

I hope the performance will be satisfactory; I haven't heard of the performance problems you describe before, so I haven't actually tested it on the new system. It seems to be widely used, and I have heard no complaints about it.

By: Martin Geisler

Martin Geisler — Thu, 08 May 2008 06:36:11 +0000

Hi Rune, cool that you stopped by! Can you tell what kind of mail backend will the new system use? For as you can see, I have had terrible performance with the current system. Have you guys evaluated the use of Dovecot as IMAP server?

When you switch, will you no longer support custom ~/.forward files? That is all I require to be able to direct the mail where I need it. Of course ~/.forward files wont matter if the new system is as fast as my home-brew system.

By: Rune B. Broberg

Rune B. Broberg — Thu, 08 May 2008 04:45:30 +0000

This sounds … interesting. While I am sure we would probably give you the freedom to do what you like with your email, you should be aware that 1) it is certainly not supported by the staff and 2) we will be switching to a new email server setup, including new software, within a reasonably short time interval.

I can’t tell you the exact date, since I don’t know it yet, but don’t spend too much energy on this - it will most likely break when we switch, and we won’t be able to transfer your existing email to the new server.

My recommendation to people at DAIMI: Avoid. ;-)

By: Martin Geisler

Martin Geisler — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:50:40 +0000

Right, my office machine is not reachable from outside the firewall, except indirectly via Apache which directs traffic for Roundup and BuildBot to it.

So if I setup some webmail system on the DAIMI webserver, then it should work nicely since the webserver can talk with my office machine behind the firewall. I can even secure the webmail since DAIMI has a SSL certificate for http://www.daimi.au.dk. I don’t think I’ll play with this right now, but all in all it sounds quite easy :-)

By: Thomas

Thomas — Fri, 02 May 2008 23:38:34 +0000

Probably not, but it’s probably not visible from the outside so you’ll have to setup some PROXY/forwarding stuff - but I guess that’s easy enough to do (I’ve done it before)

By: Martin Geisler

Martin Geisler — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:09:28 +0000

Yeah, that might be a show-stopper. The Maildir is actually at /mail/mg/Maildir on all regular DAIMI machines, but I don't know if that includes the webserver.

Another problem is that DAIMI runs all PHP processes using the same user (gopher, I believe). That is a quite poor setup -- I wont be able to manipulate the Maildir from PHP.

But I can easily setup a IMAP server on my office machine. Nobody minds me using that for a server.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:44:55 +0000

Note that you cannot access your home directory from the DAIMI webserver, so you would need to move the directory to setup a webmail system (on DAIMI at least)