[geeks] Maildir with postfix

Mark Benson md.benson at gmail.com
Thu Jan 21 12:46:05 CST 2010


On 21 Jan 2010, at 17:35, Joshua Boyd wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 05:32:58PM +0000, Mark Benson wrote:
>> I have set up and got working postfix and Dovecot for internal-only mail
>> work. I want to use Maildir because the message workload will exceed the
>> capacity of mbox mailboxes (65535 messages iirc). I know what you are
>> about to say about managing e-mail but the situation is what it is.
>>
>> Anyhoo, dovecot is latching onto my user ~/Maildir folders just fine,
>> but postfix is not delivering mail there. I added 'home_mailbox =
>> Maildir/' in /etc/postfix/main.cnf which is all that postfix is supposed
>> to require. Am I missing something? I'm fairly new to mail serving, so I
>> may have missed something. Ubuntu Docs are great but a bit basic.
>
> The last time I set it up, Postfix's LDA didn't do maildir and I had to
> use an external LDA.  I used procmail, but dovecot also has their own
> LDA now that you can use, and I hear that the sieve filtering language
> is better than procmail anyway (but I still haven't been convinced to
> reconfigure).
>
> To use the dovecot LDA, you just add a line to your postfix main.cf like
> this:
> mailbox_command = /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver

LDA is the Local Delivery Agent right? Sorry I'm doing this in baby steps.
That makes sense, and I understand what and where that command needs to go.
I'd prefer to stick to things already there if I can, procmail is not
installed at present (one reason why I got all confusified).

While I'm at it, does anyone know of the local 'mail' command (I don't even
know what program or package that is) can be made to read Maildir or if I have
to use something else to read it on the local terminal? It's not essential as
I can read my mail via IMAP from my workstation but it'd be nice.

Lastly, will system notices like the stuff I get sent from the cron
daily/weekly/monthly scripts, logrotate and warnings that daemons throw out
get sent to my Maildir or to the conventional mbox spool? If they can't handle
Maildir then I might need some way to read both mailboxes or at least the
messages from both via IMAP on my workstation as I will ultimately rely on
them for alerts.

Last but not least, is making Postfix able to send out to he 'big wide
internet' without becoming a hazard to mankind too hard? We already firewall
off all incoming traffic anyway so traffic can't get in that way. I want a
second SMTP server to fall back on as our current hosts have dealt us out a
few email service interuption lately and we rely on it a lot for our overseas
business.

Thanks. I owe this list a crate of beer already :)


--
Mark Benson

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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."



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