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

[Felix von Perger]

I recall finding this problem when I signed up, disabled forwarding, and 
managed to fix it with a symlink - since then only one or two people 
have attempted to disable forwarding so it hasn't come up much.

 From some experimenting a week or so ago with [TEC], the direction of 
the symlink seems important (if you link /var/mail/username -> 
/home/ucc/username/mail/INBOX, the symlink itself soon gets overwritten 
with an empty file).

This is what I've been using now and that seems to work:

-rw------- 1 frekk adm   501684820 May 11 10:54 /var/mail/frekk
lrwxrwxrwx 1 frekk wheel        15 Mar 10  2018 INBOX -> /var/mail/frekk

Looking at the default procmailrc, it seems like the mail should be 
delivered to ~/mail/INBOX by default, however it in fact ends up in 
/var/mail/username. See below:
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/INBOX
LOGFILE=$MAILDIR/.procmail.log

I haven't looked far into mail delivery stuff - it's the one thing at 
UCC that people _really_ complain about when it breaks. 'Nuff said.

Partly on that note, if anyone is keen to do a tech talk on the UCC mail 
system (postfix, dovecot, procmail, alpine?!, etc.), that would be very 
much appreciated. Since rebuilding mooneye is on the wheel TODO list, it 
would be good to figure out and document how the current setup works 
[before we kill it with fire].

Cheers,
Felix von Perger [FVP]

On 11/5/19 3:48 am, Mark Tearle wrote:
> 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>