Comments on: New mail server (debian + exim4 + dovecot IMAP)

By: Jesse Hobart

Jesse Hobart — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 21:23:07 +0000

This config works if you like the maildir setup. However, mbox setup works just fine with a little config change.

I use exim4 with config set to mbox: /var/mail

Modify dovecot.conf

sudo nano /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf

mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

#Your external mail will flow into /var/mail/ via exim4 and your mailboxes will be in ~/mail/.
#I believe, however, that internal mail flows into ~/mail/ through dovecot via IMAP.

#I use this config with RoundCube webmail and it works flawlessly.

By: Andrew Hearn

Andrew Hearn — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 11:55:56 +0000

Mark, I think I’ve had this caching problem on thunderbird a few time, but I use POP3. restarting thunderbird seemed to resolve it… strange though…

By: Matt Doran

Matt Doran — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 22:56:35 +0000

No I haven’t. Thunderbird works almost flawlessly with our Dovecot IMAP server. I have no idea what could be causing this.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 09:41:47 +0000

Matt, have you every had any issues regarding Thunderbirds IMAP clientside caching of the mail. I seem to be getting this quite regularly on my daughters windows box. The mail header that is highlighted in the top/right pane doesn’t relate to the lower/right mail body. Manually deleting the cache fixes the problem, as the mail is IMAPed down again, but it is still annoying! Any ideas?

By: Pieter

Pieter — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 07:09:50 +0000

I had to jump through the following hoops.

Edit /etc/exim/update-exim4.conf.conf
and add
> dc_localdelivery=maildir_home
run dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

I think it is because dpkg is managing my config.

By: Matt Doran

Matt Doran — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 06:04:38 +0000

On Debian this is in one of the files in /etc/exim4/. grep the files in there to find it. I’m using Debians split up exim config files, so for me it’s in /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/01_exim4-config_listmacrosdefs.

The section of the file you’re looking for looks like this …

# The default delivery method. See CONFDIR/conf.d/transports/ for other
# possibilities
LOCAL_DELIVERY=maildir_home

By: geos

geos — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 01:04:18 +0000

for the life of me i cant find where this goes

“The only thing we need to do to tell Exim to deliver to a maildir instead of the mbox default. In Debian it’s just a matter of setting the LOCAL_DELIVERY=maildir_home in the exim config file. The result of this is that an exim router for local mail is configured to deliver mail to the following transport”

I recomend when you say change “this” you mention what to change

By: Matt Doran

Matt Doran — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 22:27:39 +0000

I do use Mozilla Thunderbird, and it performs excellently. I switched to Thinderbird about 2 months ago and won’t go back.

My largest mail folder has about 3200 messages and sorting it is almost instantaneous. Searching is messages is also very fast. If I search message the message bodies in this folder it takes only about 1-2 seconds.

By: skippy

skippy — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 12:45:03 +0000

This follow up about speed suggests that other MUAs will not enjoy the speed benefits of Dovecot’s indexing, due (I assume) to client-side caching. I, and most of my users, use Mozilla Thunderbird for IMAP access. I’m curious what MUA you use, and what your perceived performance has been like?

By: Gaea

Gaea — Thu, 30 Sep 2004 14:24:37 +0000

Thanks very much for the tips! I’ve been trying to get pop –> fetchmail –> exim4 –> spamassassin –> etcetera –> squirrelmail for the past day or so, found this entry googling, and a few of your tips were really handy. I now have external and internal mail in ~/Maildir/new, so that’s something, eh? I set up IlohaMail with an sql backend the other day, but the no folders thing got to me and I decided it was time to really make myself miserable apt-getting and –purge-ing, going back and forth between courier and dovecot and uw and so forth. :>

Thanks again.