On Sun, 13 Jun 2010 20:20:02 +0200, Tanstaafl wrote about Re:
[gentoo-user] Anything better than procmail?:

>On 2010-06-12 5:17 PM, David W Noon wrote:
>> I wanted the messages to be stored in a single, dedicated logical
>> volume in my DASD farm.  Dovecot always stored them in each user's
>> ~/Mail/ directory, so they were all over the /home L.V.
>
>Dovecot will store them where you tell it to. You could have easily
>stored them all in a single directory like /var/virtual/mail/user, or
>even used a hashed directory scheme (which might be desirable for very
>large installations like ISPs)...

IIRC, that means that I have to give universal write access, perhaps
with a "sticky" bit, on that directory.  The database approach makes
much more sense from a security point of view, as nobody accesses the
filesystem directly, except the database manager.

>> In contrast, dbmail uses a database, in my case PostgreSQL, so it is
>> up to the database administrator to decide where they go; but it is
>> always in the one place. This makes for easy backup and restore: a
>> cron jobs runs pg_dump every night on the dbmail database..
>
>Storing mail in a database sounds interesting, but it *will* introduce
>a very noticeable performance hit, there is simply no way around it...

Actually, it doesn't.  The caching of PostgreSQL is very good, and it
performs better than ext3 or ReiserFS or JFS or ..., particularly for
random access patterns such as reading email messages.  The only
additional overhead is the cross-memory transfer through a UNIX socket
from PostgreSQL to dbmail, which is much less than the caching benefits
of PostgreSQL.

>>> I have found the author of Dovecot to be wonderfully responsive,  
>>> pushing out a fix for a deal-breaker issue for my site within hours
>>> of me reporting it.
>
>+5 Timo is coding madman... ;)

But this is Gentoo.  We get new releases when the Gentoo dev's allow
the new package through.

>> Sieve is also integrated into dbmail.
>
>And dovecot... and 2.0 will have even better integration.

But I have that now. ... :-)

You sound like a Microsoft zealot from the 1990's, where the next
release of your favourite product will have every feature imaginable --
and totally debugged too!

>>> The reject syntax [for sieve] seems nice and clear, but if the MX 
>>> server (for your email's domain name) has already accepted the
>>> message then it's not really much good rejecting it. In fact, doing
>>> so is surely frowned upon, isn't it?
>
>> I use a quarantine folder in my IMAP4 account, and my sieve script
>> places spam and infected messages there.  Since the physical location
>> is on a logical volume that holds a PostgreSQL tablespace, any
>> malware is not executable, as that L.V. is mounted with "noexec".
>> This is another advantage over placing mail in the /home L.V., in
>> each user's home directory.
>
>While dovecot+sieve does require a 'home' directory for sieve to work,
>it doesn't have to be the users real home directory, and with
>dovecot-LDA+sieve, you can safely reject at smtp time, and its vacation
>message system is very sane (doesn't send vacation messages when it
>shouldn't, like to mail lists, etc)...

What's a "vacation"? ... :-))
-- 
Regards,

Dave  [RLU #314465]
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dwnoon@ntlworld.com (David W Noon)
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