Tag Archives: mail

Linux, Mail

Dovecot: convert mdbox to mbox format

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Dovecot comes with a proprietary mailbox-format (sd/mdbox) that provides some benefits in regard of compression and performance but is not really readable with nothing else than an editor.

It seems that there are very little information on how to convert the sd/mdbox-fomat to mbox (at least nothing copy and paste like if you aren’t a dovecot admin and have no clue ;))

So here is one possible-way it could be archived:

To work around adapting the dovecot-config and running a dovecot-service for dsync to use, we can also pass configuration parameters (by default dsync uses the dovecot-configuration file stored at /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf) directly to dsync.
With that trick there is no need to configure & start a dovecot service.

An example command to convert a mailbox in mdbox-format located in the users home dir under mail to mbox format would look like:

dsync -o "mail_location=mdbox:~/mail" backup mbox:~/dstest

Converting to other formats like maildir might require additional configuration parameters within the /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf file as namespaces or similar.

IMPORTANT:
Override options specified via “-o” must be passed directly after the dsync command and before “backup”


For converting a mailbox the “backup” attribute is recommended as this will do a 1-way-sync.

Linux, Webserver

Basic mail configuration for webserver and mailforwarding for root

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Till now I didn’t configured any mail support for wordpress but today I wanted to enable wordpress to send mails to me and became aware that I didn’t configure postfix for my system.

In fact a basic configuration is quite easy. If the webserver should be able to send mails to an address of your choice you may hav to adapt the follwoing parameters in the /etc/postfix/main.cf:

myhostname = vps.fawcs.info
mydomain = fawcs.info
myorigin = $mydomain

After those three parameters are configured the postfix service has to be restarted: systemctl restart postfix.service

If there are still no mails comming in check if the /etc/php.ini is configured to use sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i

I also recogized that there are some mail in the inbox for the root user so I decided to also enable mail fowarding to get new mails directly to my mail-address instead of the root’s inbox.

Herfore the last line in /etc/aliases has to be uncommented to look like:
# Person who should get root’s mail
root: yourmail@yourdomain.info

Afterwards the postfix service has to be restarted once again and in the future all mails will be forwareded to the system.

if you have troubles receiving mails the mailq command is helpful to debug problems with unsent mails or mails which get rejected by the receiving mail server. A look at the /var/log/maillog logfile is also worth a try. 😉