[tech] IMAP Broken for all new users (and for the last 4 years)

[Mark Tearle]

On Fri, 10 May 2019, at 2:09 PM, Andrew Adamson wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I was doing some testing tonight and found that any user who chooses not 
> to forward their email elsewhere is getting a pretty bad email experience 
> in UCC. 
> 
> Every new user gets a copy of the skeleton home directory, which includes 
> a procmailrc file that causes all that users mail to be pulled from 
> /var/mail/<username> into ~<username>/mail/INBOX. Unfortunately, even 
> though /var/mail/<username> is empty, dovecot (the imap server) is still 
> looking at that file and treating it as the inbox, so when you log into 
> webmail, or connect with a mail client, you see an empty inbox. In the 
> case of connecting with outlook, the test email that is sent to test your 
> account fails (since it can't see it arriving in the inbox), and you can 
> never get the account to add on outlook. It's hence not surprising that 
> people are recommending to new members that they forward their email.
> 
> I'm not able to fix this - is anyone else able to take a look?
> 
> Andrew Adamson
> bob at ucc.asn.au
> 

I think this would require us to change both our postfix and dovecot settings.    What should be the correct behaviour for local delivery?

With dovecot, you can either set what it should be globally, on a per user basis, or let it autodetect (by leaving out the appropriate config line).   I suspect autodetect is what we should go for, we just need to check we don't break the users who were working ....


Mark
--
Mark Tearle <mtearle at ucc.asn.au>