[OpenIndiana-discuss] The mailing list is dead

[Jonathan Adams]

On 18 December 2015 at 15:59, Richard L. Hamilton <rlhamil at smart.net> wrote:

>
> > On Dec 18, 2015, at 04:30, Jonathan Adams <t12nslookup at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 18 December 2015 at 01:40, Richard L. Hamilton <rlhamil at smart.net>
> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>> On Dec 17, 2015, at 15:22, David Brodbeck <brodbd at uw.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> <snip/>
> >
> >
> >> My sendmail is recompiled to support authentication, etc; and forwards
> to
> >> an ISP's submission port with authentication (bypassing the cable ISP's
> >> block on port 25 outgoing (and sadly incoming, too)).  Note: I'm
> >> disappointed that even in Solaris 11, it doesn't seem that
> authentication
> >> support was configured into the stock sendmail.  And yeah, postfix is
> >> cooler and allegedly more secure, but IMO sendmail remains the king of
> >> flexible function, and with the O'Reilly books already in hand, it's not
> >> that bad to configure.
> >>
> >> A cron job runs fetchmail periodically to download mail.
> >>
> >
> > I remember the days when I used to do that ... not nice.
> >
> >
> >> So one can have something approaching normal self-hosted email
> >> functionality, despite ISP games.  There's the 5 minute delay for the
> cron
> >> job to run, but no more than that.  My Mac email client also watches the
> >> staging inbox on the other end, so I can read something before it's
> >> downloaded if I can't wait 5 minutes.
> >>
> >> It all works fairly well, save that my IMAP server is the old UW one,
> >> which is very inefficient - doesn't scale to large mailboxes; I'd
> chosen it
> >> ages ago for compatibility with existing Solaris local mailboxes.  I'm
> on
> >> my way to setting up dovecot and squirrelmail in an LDOM on my T5240,
> but I
> >> really don't look forward to migrating a few gigs of mail scattered
> across
> >> hundreds of mailboxes (including saved Usenet posts by group, etc).  The
> >> space is not major (even though the LDOMs don't have that much space
> using
> >> the existing internal drives), but shutting it all down while I copy and
> >> convert mailbox formats...yuck.  So for now, I have to keep the inbox
> and a
> >> couple of other very active ones down to small sizes, while this still
> runs
> >> with inefficient software on a Sun Blade 100. :-)
> >>
> >> I have a script (unfortunately it's perl) that does a reasonable job of
> > converting old Solaris Mail folders to Maildir format, and a "procmail"
> > script that I use as the "local mail delivery agent" for sendmail that
> > stores new email as Maildir ...
> >
> > As a company we kept 2 mail servers going at each site (that had more
> than
> > 10 people) whilst we converted the people one at a time, and it's time
> > consuming.  On a positive note, now that the server doesn't need to open
> > the entire mail folder into memory, and the indexes are stored on disk,
> the
> > memory footprint of dovecot is almost as small as the old Solaris POP3
> > server, and the speed of access for a new client is almost instant (no
> need
> > for the client to rebuild it's own index, which used to kill the server
> and
> > all other connected IMAP clients!)
> >
> > do you know how much data you have in total, how much down time you can
> > afford?
> >
> > Jon
>
> Oh, it's just my stuff, and I'm retired.  Assuming no trips planned, it
> could stay down as long as need be.  It's just going to be a PITA to make
> something that sort of works (if reaching the limits of scale) into
> something that works better. :-)
>
> Hmm, I thought it was a customised version, but it appears to be stock
from http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/MailFormat notably
http://dovecot.org/tools/mb2md.pl

it needs perl's TimeDate installing first.

from our wiki:

"Converting old mail to dovecot for each user

Once dovecot has been set up you need to do the following to convert staff
from the old server to the new one

< ldap stuff >

Next steps run as the user. This converts the mailfolders from Mail to
Maildir
manrecserver% cd
manrecserver% perl /home/jadams/mb2md.pl -s Mail -R

For a single file/folder copied from the "old email"
anrecserver% perl /home/jadams/mb2md.pl -s mymailfolder -d
Maildir/.mymailfolder

Then on old mail server cp /var/mail/username to Inbox
manrecserver% perl /home/jadams/mb2md.pl -s Inbox -d Maildir

Tell person to remove Mail prefix from thunderbird server config"

if you're planning on using procmail as the MTA:

zippy# more procmailrc
# Run with the recipients privileges
#
DROPPRIVS=yes
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------

# To get maildir delivery#
DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/

# Make sure that $HOME/Maildir/ exist!
#
:0
* ? /usr/bin/test -d $DEFAULT || /bin/mkdir $DEFAULT
{ }
:0 E
{
        # Bail out if directory could not be created
        EXITCODE=127
        HOST=bail.out
}
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------

# ------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# Change to DEFAULT directory
#
MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------


and the line for my sendmail.mc file:

FEATURE(local_procmail, `/opt/sfw/bin/procmail')dnl

(yes, on that Solaris 10 machine I'm using the sfw procmail)

I have additional procmail scripts, and I am hidden behind a large number
of "sendmail"s before you get to the final internal server ...

hope this helps someone.

Jon