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Q. We used to use University of Washington IMAP (UW IMAP), in the Red
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Hat distribution, the rpm was named "imap". We would now like to use
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dovecot and take advantage of its support for Maildir format, but
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we have existing user mail files in the old mbox format we need to
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migrate. How can we do this?
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A. Read the documentation in
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/usr/share/doc/dovecot-*/UW-to-Dovecot-Migration. You will also
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find scripts there to help you.
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Q. I'm getting errors in /var/log/maillog for dotlock failed,
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permission denied. The actual error probably looks like this with
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user replaced by a user name on your system.
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imap(user): file_lock_dotlock() failed with mbox file /var/spool/mail/user: Permission denied
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A. This is occuring because:
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1) The user INBOX is in the system spool directory which is:
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"drwxrwxr-x root mail"
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2) Dovecot is configured to create "dotlock" locking files.
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3) After an imap user logs in the imap process runs as that user
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and the spool directory permissions does not allow that user to
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creat new files (e.g. dot lock files).
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The possible solutions are:
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1) Don't locate the user's INBOX in the system spool directory,
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have mail delivered to another location, for instance his home
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directory (this may not be possible to change for existing
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systems). This is an MTA configuration.
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2) In the dovecot configuration file set the variable
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mail_extra_groups to "mail". This will add the mail group to the
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list of groups that the logged in imap user will have permission
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for. His imap process can then create files in the mail spool
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file. However the user's imap process now has mail group
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privileges, you will have to evaluate the extent of the security
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threat this poses for your site.
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3) Disable the use of dotlocks by setting dovecots config parameter
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mbox_locks to a value that does not include dotlock, for
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example, fcntl. However, note dotlocks are considered robust,
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especially for NFS.
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