Software update: Dovecot 2.1.1

Dovecot is a mail server with support for imap, pop3, ipv6, ssl and tls, and is partly under an MIT and partly under a Lgplv2.1 license. Maildir, mbox and the self-developed dbox format can be used to store mail messages. In addition, MTAs such as Postfix 2.3+ and Exim 4.64+ can perform their smtp authentication process at Dovecot without any intermediate steps. The developer released version 2.1.1 a few days ago, with the following announcement:

Version 2.1.1 released

v2.1.0 had a couple of bugs, but overall people have been pretty quiet about it. I’m hoping v2.1.2 won’t need to be released for many more weeks. 🙂

VAT. v2.2 branch has also been opened in hg. Not much stuff in there yet though.

• dsync: If message with same ID is saved multiple times in session, copy it instead of re-saving.
• acl plugin + autocreated mailboxes crashed when listing mailboxes
• doveadm force-resync: Don’t skip autocreated mailboxes (especially INBOX).
• If process runs out of fds, stop listening for new connections only temporarily, not permanently (avoids hangs with process_limit=1 services)
• auth: passdb imap crashed for non-login authentication (eg smtp).

Version 2.1.0 released

Here’s finally the stable v2.1 release. I expect this release to be quite stable, since it’s already being used in several large installations.

Changes since rc7: FS layout related crashfix, two man pages added.

The biggest changes since v2.0:

• Plugins now use UTF-8 mailbox names rather than mUTF-7: acl, autocreate, expire, trash, virtual
• auth_username_format default changed to %Lu. If you really want case sensitive usernames, set it back to empty.
• Solr full text search backend changed to use mailbox GUIDs instead of mailbox names, requiring reindexing everything. solr_old backend can be used with old indexes to avoid reindexing, but it doesn’t support some newer features.
• Expire plugin: Only go through users listed by userdb iteration. Delete dict rows for nonexistent users, unless expire_keep_nonexistent_users=yes.
• Temporary authentication failures sent to IMAP/POP3 clients now includes the server’s hostname and timestamp. This makes it easier to find the error message from logs.
• dsync was merged into doveadm. There is still “dsync” symlink pointing to “doveadm”, which you can use the old way for now. The preferred ways to run dsync are “doveadm sync” (for old “dsync mirror”) and “doveadm backup”.
• imapc (= IMAP client) storage allows using a remote IMAP server to be used as storage. This allows using Dovecot as a smart (caching) proxy or using dsync to do migration from remote IMAP server.
• Mailbox indexing via queuing indexer service (required for Lucene)
• Lucene full text search (FTS) backend rewritten with support for different languages
• FTS finally supports “OR” search operation
• FTS supports indexing attachments via external programs
• IMAP FUZZY extension, supported by Lucene and Solr FTS backends
• IMAP SPECIAL-USE extension to describe mailboxes
• Mailbox list indexes
• Statistics tracking via stats service. Exported via doveadm stats.
• Autocreate plugin creates/subscribes mailboxes physically only when the mailbox is opened for the first time. Mailbox listing shows the autocreated mailboxes even if they don’t physically exist.
• Password and user databases now support default_fields and override_fields settings to specify template defaults/overrides.
• SCRAM-SHA-1 authentication mechanism by Florian Zeitz
• LDAP: Allow building passdb/userdb extra fields from multiple LDAP attributes by using %{ldap:attributeName} variables in the template.
• Improved multi-instance support: Track automatically which instances are started up and manage the list with doveadm instance commands. All Dovecot commands now support -i parameter to select the instance (instead of having to use -c ). See instance_name setting.
• auth: Implemented support for Postfix’s “TCP map” sockets for user existence lookups.
• listescape plugin works perfectly now