Re: [gentoo-user] Anything better than procmail?

[Tanstaafl <tanstaafl@libertytrek.org>]

On 2010-06-12 5:17 PM, David W Noon wrote:
>> On 12 Jun 2010, at 12:35, David W Noon wrote:
>>> ... Dovecot, but quickly replaced by dbmail.

>> Can I ask you why?

> Certainly.
> 
> 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)...

> 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...

>> 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... ;)

> Sieve is also integrated into dbmail.

And dovecot... and 2.0 will have even better integration.

>> 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)...