text:
Managing IMAPBy Dianna Mullet & Kevin Mullet
1st Edition September 2000
0-596-00012-X, Order Number: 012X
550 pages, $34.95
Chapter 9In this chapter:
Cyrus System Administration
Cyrus System Administration
Common Tasks
Batch Account Maintenance
Shared Folders and Bulletin Boards
Mailstore Partitioning
Quota Maintenance
Disaster Recovery
Migration from Berkeley Mailbox Format to Cyrus
Mail Forwarding and Filtering
Usenet Integration
Adding SSL Support
Now that you've installed and configured the Cyrus server, you're faced with maintaining it. This chapter covers the basics of managing a Cyrus system on a day-to-day basis. We will walk through examples of how to create, delete, and list the properties of mailboxes using cyradm, the Cyrus administration tool. We will also see examples of how to use cyradm to manage existing mailboxes. Cyrus administrators are often faced with the task of creating, deleting, or modifying a batch of accounts. Examples of batch cyradm scripts are shown. We will also see examples of how to add and remove partitions to and from the Cyrus mailstore. Shared folders and bulletin boards are valuable features of the Cyrus server. We will see examples of how to set up and manage both.
Cyrus System Administration with cyradm
cyradm is a Tcl-based client for performing system administration on the Cyrus server. cyradm can be run in either interactive mode or batch mode. We will look at interactive mode first, and cover batch operations later in the chapter. Note that the information contained in this chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive account of cyradm --there are cyradm command options that are rarely used. See the manual page, cyradm (1), or Appendix A, Conversion from Berkeley Mail Format to Cyrus: Tools, for the nitty-gritty details. The objective here is to cover the most common tasks that Cyrus administrators encounter.
To start cyradm in interactive mode, simply enter the command:
$ cyradm -user username hostname port
username is a Cyrus administrative user defined in /etc/imapd.conf. hostname is the hostname of the Cyrus server. port defaults to port 143, the standard IMAP port. Here is an example interactive session:
$ cyradm -user cyrus localhost
localhost password: XXXXXXXX
If you need help, type help at the prompt. When you want to quit, use one of the commands quit or exit.
cyradm has a set of commands for performing common tasks on a Cyrus system, such as creating accounts and listing users' quotas. Table 9-1 lists the commands and gives a brief description of the purpose of each. cyradm commands can be abbreviated to cut down on keystrokes--the abbreviations are also shown in Table 9-1.
Table 9-1: cyradm Commands
Lists the names of all mailboxes that match a given pattern.
Creates a new top-level mailbox.
Deletes a mailbox and all mailboxes below it in its hierarchy.
Renames a mailbox.
Adds an entry to a maibox's ACL.
Deletes an entry from a mailbox's ACL.
Lists a mailbox's ACL.
Sets a quota limit on a quota root.
Lists the quotas on a quota root.
lqr or lqm
Lists the quota roots on a mailbox.
The renamemailbox command is more complicated than meets the eye--it renames a single mailbox only and ignores all other mailboxes in the hierarchy. A workaround for renaming complete mailbox hierarchies is provided later in this chapter.
The .cyradmrc File
If the file .cyradmrc exists in user 's home directory, cyradm will evaluate the file as a Tcl script after connecting and authenticating to server and just before reading the first command from standard input.
Common Tasks
This section shows examples of common tasks you'll perform every day using cyradm: listing, creating, and deleting mailboxes; setting quotas; and setting ACLs.
Listing Mailboxes
The listmailbox (or lm) command returns a list of mailbox names that match the pattern given as an argument. The pattern can contain one of the wildcard characters asterisk (*) or percent (%). The * wildcard matches zero or more characters. The % wildcard is like the * wildcard, except that it only matches mailboxes at a single level in the mailbox hierarchy.
You can list all the users on the system by listing their top-level mailboxes (remember, a top-level mailbox is essentially the same as a username in the Cyrus namespace):
localhost> listmailbox user.%
To list all mailboxes one level below abt0003 's top-level mailbox, you would use the % wildcard character to restrict output to include only that level:
localhost> listmailbox user.abt0003.%
user.abt0003.drafts user.abt0003.sent-mail
To list all users whose usernames begin with the letters abt, you would again use the % wildcard to restrict output to only top-level mailboxes:
localhost> listmailbox user.abt%
user.abt0003 user.abt0008
The next example shows how the * wildcard character returns mailboxes that match the pattern at all levels of the mailbox hierarchy:
localhost> listmailbox user.abt*
user.abt0003 user.abt0003.sent-mail user.abt0008.drafts
user.abt0003.drafts user.abt0008
Creating a Mailbox or Adding a User
The createmailbox (cm) command creates a new mailbox, mailbox. There is an optional partition argument that specifies the name of the partition on which to create the mailbox. If no partition is specified, the mailbox is created on the partition named default (it is defined in /etc/imapd.conf as the
On production Cyrus systems, users are usually added to the system in batches by running a script, but on occasion, you might have to add a new user manually. Once a top-level mailbox is created for a user, the user is officially "on the system" and can begin receiving email. To add a new user, abt0010, you would issue the command:
localhost> createmailbox user.abt0010
localhost> listmailbox user.abt0010
abt0010 's top-level mailbox would be created on the defaultpartition.
A top-level mailbox is essentially the same as an IMAP account--once a user has a top-level mailbox and some means to authenticate to the server, he or she has an account on the Cyrus server.
If the user does not already have authentication credentials, then you should set them up now--see Chapter 8, Configuring the Cyrus Server, for details on setting up authentication.
You may also create mailboxes below a user's top-level mailbox. Many sites create a few default mailboxes for each new user added to the system, such as a Trash mailbox (user.username.Trash) or a Drafts mailbox (user.username.Drafts), for the convenience of the user.
Mailbox Access Control
Cyrus has an Internet standards-compliant way of organizing access to each mailbox. That method is known as an access control list (ACL). Simply speaking, an ACL is like a security guard with a clipboard sitting at the entrance to each and every mailbox, checking all who would presume to enter against an administrative list of who's allowed to do what. A more familiar example of an access control system may be Unix file ownership and permissions. We don't want to launch into a full-fledged description of Unix access control--it's been done well in other books. Unix files and directories have an owner, and access to other users can be granted with different combinations of group ownership and permission settings on the file.
A Cyrus mailbox also has an owner, and as with a Unix file, access to the mailbox can be granted to other users. Cyrus access control is more granular, though, than the Unix access control model. In the Cyrus model, it's possible to grant more than one group of users access to the mailbox without nesting groups, as you would have to do when dealing with Unix groups. Instead of just the read, write, and execute permissions that are granted on Unix files, a Cyrus user can be granted nine different levels of access (see Table 9-2).
When a new mailbox is created in the Cyrus system, it is created with a default set of access rights that are defined in the IMAP configuration file, /etc/imapd.conf. That default ACL applies only to newly created top-level mailboxes--mailboxes that are created in an existing hierarchy inherit the ACL of their nearest parent mailbox. That's a bit different from what you would expect if you're familiar with Unix permissions. In the Unix system, permissions on subdirectories are not inherited from the parent directory in a filesystem.[1]
The question is, then, "when are ACLs used?" They are primarily used to allow users other than the mailbox owner to access a mailbox. This might be desirable when:
- You want to allow a colleague to read mail in a mailbox where you store mail related to a project you're collaborating on.
- A group of users, such as a technical support group, need to share a mailbox and keep track of the status of messages in that mailbox.
- You want to make a mailing list archive publicly accessible to the Internet.[2]
Read on to find out how to set the ACL for each of those three situations.
The setaclmailbox command
setaclmailbox is the cyradm command to modify a mailbox's ACL. The usage is:
setaclmailbox mailbox identifier rights
identifier refers to a user, group (a group is an entity specific to your authentication mechanism; e.g., a group in /etc/group if you use Unix authentication--refer to Chapter 8 for information on setting up groups), or one of the predefined special identifiers, anonymous or anyone, which were described in Chapter 6, Introduction to the Cyrus IMAP Server. Rights are shown in Table 9-2.
Table 9-2: Mailbox Access Rights
Access Right
Look up the name of the mailbox (but not its contents).
Read the contents of the mailbox.
Preserve the "seen" and "recent" status of messages across IMAP sessions.
Write (change message flags such as "recent," "answered," and "draft").
Insert (move or copy) a message into the mailbox.
Post a message in the mailbox by sending the message to the mailbox's submission address (for example, post a message in the cyrushelp mailbox by sending a message to firstname.lastname@example.com).
Create a new mailbox below the top-level mailbox (ordinary users cannot create top-level mailboxes).
Delete a message and/or the mailbox itself.
Administer the mailbox (change the mailbox's ACL).
There are abbreviations describing the more common sets of rights that make it easier to set the more common ACLs. The abbreviations are listed in Table 9-3.
Table 9-3: Abbreviations for Common Access Rights
Access Rights
The user has no rights whatsoever.
Allows a user to read the contents of the mailbox.
Allows a user to read the mailbox and post to it through the delivery system by sending mail to the mailbox's submission address.
Allows a user to read the mailbox and append messages to it, either via IMAP or through the delivery system.
Allows a user to read the maibox, post to it, append messages to it, and delete messages or the mailbox itself. The only right not given is the right to change the mailbox's ACL.
The user has all possible rights on the mailbox. This is usually granted to users only on the mailboxes they own.
Cyrus administrators (those users defined as admins in /etc/imapd.conf ) have l and a rights on all mailboxes by default. When a new user is added to the system, the user is first assigned all rights on her top-level mailbox. In all other cases, when a new mailbox is created, the new mailbox inherits the ACL of the closest parent mailbox. Non-user mailboxes (such as those used to export Usenet news groups) with no parent are assigned the ACL defined in the
defaultacloption in /etc/imapd.conf.
To compute a user's or group's mailbox access rights, the server takes the union of the user's rights and the rights of all groups the user is a member of. In the following example ACL, user mary is a member of group helpdesk, so she inherits p rights from the helpdesk group and, as a result, has l, r, s, and p rights:
mary lrs
group:helpdesk lrsp
It is also possible to assign a user negative rights by prefixing the identifier (not the access right) with a dash (-) character. The result is that the access rights are removed from the mailbox for the user or group that comprise the identifier. For example:
anyone read
-anonymous s
This ACL allows anyone l, r, and s rights, while anonymous is allowed only l and r rights. After computing a user's access rights, the server computes the user's negative rights by taking the union of all negative rights assigned to the user and all groups the user is a member of, and removes those rights.
Common examples
Earlier, we promised to illustrate how to set up ACLs for three common uses of shared folders. The first example involves sharing a mailbox with one other user. Suppose johndoe has a mailbox, user.johndoe.grant-proposal, and he wishes to give his colleague, annsmith, read-only access to the messages in that mailbox. johndoe would set the ACL on the mailbox as follows:
localhost> listaclmailbox user.johndoe.grant-proposal
johndoe lrswipcda
localhost> setaclmailbox user.johndoe.grant-proposal annsmith read
localhost> listaclmailbox user.johndoe.grant-proposal
johndoe lrswipcda
annsmith lrs
The second example involves sharing a mailbox with both read and write access to a group of users that needs to preserve the state of the mailbox between access by different users. Such a group might be a Helpdesk. In the example that follows, the group helpdesk (defined in /etc/group) is given write access to the mailbox user.help. One member of the helpdesk group, boss, is granted administrative access--somebody has to maintain the mailbox's ACL, and boss, the Helpdesk coordinator, seems to be the best candidate:
localhost> listaclmailbox user.help
help lrswipcda
localhost> setaclmailbox user.help group:helpdesk write
localhost> setaclmailbox user.help boss all
localhost> listaclmailbox user.help
help lrswipcda
group:helpdesk lrswipcd
boss lrswipcda
In the final example, a site maintains a mailing list archive and wants to make it accessible to anyone on the Internet. The archive is stored in the mailbox user.lists.security-l.archive. To open up access to anyone on the Internet, the access rights would be set to allow anyone to read the mailbox:
localhost> listaclmailbox user.lists.security-l.archive
lists lrswipcda
localhost> setaclmailbox user.lists.security-l.archive anonymous read
help lrswipcda
anonymous lrs
Deleting a Mailbox or Removing a User
The deletemailbox (dm) command deletes a top-level mailbox, its contents, and all mailboxes below it in the hierarchy, essentially removing the user from the Cyrus system.
Administrators do not have delete rights on mailboxes by default.
Before you attempt to delete a mailbox, be sure to use the setaclmailbox command to give yourself explicit d (delete) rights before deleting a mailbox, as in the following example:
localhost> setaclmailbox user.johndoe cyrusadm d
localhost> deletemailbox user.johndoe
Managing Quotas
setquota sets the quota limit on a quota root to a given value. Quotas on the Cyrus system are always expressed in kilobytes. Typically, the quota root is a user's top-level mailbox:
localhost> setquota user.johndoe 15000
The listquotaroot (or lqr ) command lists the usage and limit on the given quota root. In the following example, the user johndoe has a quota limit of 15,000 kilobytes on his top-level mailbox and has used 1,363 kilobytes:
localhost> listquotaroot user.johndoe
user.dianna STORAGE 1363/15000 (9%)
cyradm does not offer a facility for removing a user's quota--quotas have to be removed manually by deleting the quota file associated with the user, then rebuilding the Cyrus quota database. The details are explained later in this chapter.
Renaming a User's Account
The renamemailbox command:
renamemailbox mailbox newmailbox partition
renames mailbox to newmailbox. The optional partition argument is used if you want to move the newmailbox to a different partition.
renamemailbox does exactly what its name implies, and that's all it does--it renames a single mailbox. The command has an important limitation, though: it cannot be used to rename a top-level mailbox. Here is what happens when we attempt to rename a top-level mailbox:
localhost> renamemailbox user.diannal user.diannam
command failed: Operation is not supported on mailbox
Top-level mailboxes cannot be renamed because of a Cyrus architectural issue. Renaming a top-level mailbox requires changes in other parts of the system, such as the mailboxes file, the quota subsystem, the mailbox subscription database, and the names of all mailboxes below the top level in the hierarchy. This can be a problem--many sites allow users to change their account names at some time after the account is initially created. It is also important to note that renamemailbox does not hierarchically rename mailboxes--it only renames the mailbox that it is given as an argument. All other mailboxes below that mailbox in the hierarchy are left untouched. CMU will provide a hierarchical renamemailbox command in Cyrus 2.0, but it does not yet appear in any release up through Version 1.6.22. Until cyradm supports hierarchical renaming, it will be of limited use on its own. Fortunately, as with many limitations, there is a usually a workaround. The workaround, which is implemented as a Tcl script in Example 9-2 in the next section of this chapter, involves these steps (in the order given):
- Create a new top-level mailbox named for the new username (for example, user.newname).
- Create new sub-mailboxes for all the mailboxes in the user's old hierarchy (user.newname.sent-mail ).
- Replace the new, empty mailbox hierarchy with the old mailbox hierarchy.
- Delete the old account.
- Reconstruct the new account using the Cyrus reconstruct utility.
- Set a quota root on the new account.
Note that although you may read about other workarounds that involved direct editing of the mailboxes file, we caution you never to edit the mailboxes file directly! It's an unnecessary risk--the tools exist for working within the system; it's just a matter of stringing them together in the right way to do the job.
Batch Account Maintenance with cyradm
cyradm can be invoked in a script to read and evaluate a series of Tcl commands. In batch mode, cyradm command names cannot be abbreviated as they can be in interactive mode (e.g., setaclmailbox cannot be invoked as sam). When running cyradm in non-interactive mode, you will always use one Tcl command that has not been mentioned yet: the command cyradm connect. The cyradm connect command opens an IMAP connection to the server, and it is always the first command you execute in a batch cyradm script.
The usage of the cyradm connect command is:
cyradm connect connectionname
where connectionname is an arbitrary handle that denotes the connection to the IMAP server. Once a connection is established, other cyradm commands are issued as:
connectionname command
The command command is any one of the cyradm commands discussed earlier in the chapter. It may also be one of the following commands that have not yet been introduced:
- connectionname servername
- Returns the hostname of the server the connection is connected to.
- connectionname authenticate
- Authenticates the connection. connection authenticate has two command switches, shown in Table 9-4.
Table 9-4: connection authenticate Command Switches
Log in to the Cyrus server as username.
Perform a plaintext password login. script must consist of Tcl commands that return the username and password, for example:
cyr_conn authenticate -pwcommand {
set adminid "cyrusadm"
set adminpw "xxxxxxxx"
list $adminid $adminpw
Add New Users
Example 9-1, addusers, is a Tcl script that uses cyradm to create a batch of new IMAP user accounts and set a quota root on each account. To run the script, type the command:
$ addusers filename
where filename is a plain file containing one username per line.
Example 9-1: The addusers Script
#!/usr/local/bin/cyradm -file
# Batch Cyrus user creation script. Usage: addusers filename
set inputfile [lindex $argv 0] # Name of file containing users
set quotalimit 15360 # Quota limit in Kbytes
eval cyradm connect cyr_conn venus 143
puts stdout "Connected to IMAP server. Authenticating..."
if [catch {eval cyr_conn authenticate -pwcommand {{
set hostname "localhost"
set adminid "cyrusadm"
set adminpw "xxxxxxxx"
list $adminid $adminpw
}} } result ] {
puts stderr "$result (cleartext)"
return -code error $result
} else {
puts "Authentication successful."
The script opens a connection to the Cyrus server called venus and logs in as user cyrusadm with password xxxxxxxx. Once the connection is established and authenticated, the input file is opened. The script loops through each line of input, assigns the contents of the line to the variable user, and creates a new top-level mailbox for user. After the mailbox is created, the quota defined in the variable quotalimit at the start of the script is applied to the new mailbox:
if [catch {open $inputfile r} fileId] {
puts stderr "Error: cannot open $inputfile"
} else {
while {[gets $fileId user] >= 0} {
## Create the INBOX
if [catch {cyr_conn createmailbox user.$user} result] {
puts stderr $result
} else {
puts "Created mailbox user.$user"
## Create the default mailboxes
if [catch {cyr_conn createmailbox user.$user.drafts} result] {
puts stderr $result
} else {
puts " Created mailbox user.$user.drafts"
if [catch {cyr_conn createmailbox user.$user.sent-mail} result] {
puts stderr $result
} else {
puts " Created mailbox user.$user.sent-mail"
## Set the quota
puts " Setting quota $quotalimit on user.$user..."
cyr_conn setquota "user.$user" "storage" "$quotalimit"
Rename an Account
The next script, rename, is a Tcl script that renames a user's mailboxes. Cyradm has a built-in rename command, but the command works only on top-level mailboxes--it does not rename mailboxes lower in the hierarchy. The rename script in Example 9-2 renames the top-level mailbox and all mailboxes below it in the user's mailbox hierarchy.
You will often find it necessary to rename a user's mailbox if her name is reflected in her username and her full name changes. In the examples provided in this section, user anndoe (Ann Doe) married and changed her last name to Smith, and she asked the system administrator to change her Cyrus username to annsmith.
First, in cyradm, list the user's mailboxes, excluding the top-level mailbox. Save the mailbox names in a text file--you will use it later as input to the script that renames the account:
localhost> lm user.anndoe.*
Suppose we saved the lm output in a file called lm.out. To rename anndoe 's account to annsmith, you would run the command:
$ rename lm.out anndoe annsmith
Example 9-2: The rename Script
#!/usr/local/bin/cyradm -file
# Usage: rename filename olduser newuser
set inputfile [lindex $argv 0]
set oldmb [lindex $argv 1]
set newmb [lindex $argv 2]
set mailstore "/var/spool/imap/user"
eval cyradm connect cyr_conn localhost 143
puts stdout "Connected to IMAP server. Authenticating..."
if [catch {eval cyr_conn authenticate -pwcommand {{
set hostname "localhost"
set adminid "cyrus"
set adminpw "XXXXXXXX"
list $adminid $adminpw
}} } result ] {
puts stderr "$result (cleartext)"
return -code error $result
} else {
puts "Authentication successful."
## Open the file containing mailbox names, and create the
## top-level mailbox.
if [catch {open $inputfile r} fileId] {
puts stderr "Error: cannot open $inputfile"
} else {
## Create the toplevel mailbox
if [catch {cyr_conn createmailbox user.$newmb} result] {
puts stderr $result
} else {
puts "Created mailbox user.$newmb"
while {[gets $fileId line] >= 0} {
## Build the new mailbox name from the old one
set newf [join [lreplace [split $line .] 1 1 $newmb] . ]
## Create the mailbox
if [catch {cyr_conn createmailbox $newf} result] {
puts stderr $result
} else {
puts "Created sub-mailbox $newf"
file delete -force /var/spool/cyrus/user/$newmb
file copy $mailstore/$oldmb $mailstore/$newmb
{exec /usr/bin/chown -R cyrus:mail $mailstore/$newmb}
## Delete the old account
if [catch {cyr_conn setaclmailbox user.$oldmb cyrusadm d} \
result] {
puts stderr $result
} else {
puts "setaclmailbox user.$oldmb cyrusadm d"
if [catch {cyr_conn deletemailbox user.$oldmb} result] {
puts stderr $result
} else {
puts "Deleted mailbox user.$oldmb"
puts "Please run \'reconstruct user.$newmb\' as cyrus."
After renaming the mailboxes, run reconstruct as the cyrus user, before doing anything else. Until you have run reconstruct, the account is not fully active:
$ reconstruct -r user.annsmith
Shared Folders and Bulletin Boards
The Cyrus IMAP server is unique in its capability to make a mailing list available to many users via the IMAP protocol alone. Cyrus accomplishes that feat with shared folders and bulletin boards.
Shared folders and bulletin boards are ordinary Cyrus mailboxes with ACLs that allow more than one user access to the mailbox. There is really not much difference between shared folders and bulletin boards: they are both Cyrus mailboxes, and both allow users other than the mailbox owner to access the mailbox with the permissions defined in the mailbox's ACL.
When a Cyrus mailbox is referred to as a shared folder, it generally means that it is a mailbox owned by an individual user who wants to allow other users access to the mailbox. An additional feature of a shared folder is that, other than the "read" flag, it does not retain message state information that is unique per user. Message information like deleted or important is global to all users. That feature could be useful if it is desirable to preserve state information across accesses by different users. If you use a shared folder for a group of users, such as a Helpdesk, chances are you will want to preserve the seen and answered states across sessions, to provide a sort of work flow for the Helpdesk employees.
A bulletin board is a Cyrus mailbox that is owned by the system, rather than by an individual user. Bulletin boards are generally used when it is desirable to maintain a per-user seen state. Good uses for bulletin boards are forums such as Usenet groups and Internet mailing lists.
There are no fixed rules, only guidelines, about whether to use a shared folder or bulletin board for your particular application.
Implementing Shared Folders
When creating a shared folder, the first step is to create the mailbox that will be shared. Because clients handle mailbox names differently, make the mailbox name as descriptive as possible. Remember that with Unix authentication, the mailbox name is actually the name of a user in the password file. That limits the mailbox name to eight characters or less. A good guideline to follow when creating the top-level mailbox is to configure for the lowest common denominator. Don't use more than eight characters in the top-level mailbox name--anticipate a migration to another mail system or authentication system someday in the future. There is also the issue of MUAs--some clients can get confused by long usernames. If there are to be sub-folders in the hierarchy, you need not be as strict with naming them.
After creating the mailboxes, set the ACL to allow the appropriate users access. For example, suppose we need a shared mailbox called announce, with sub-folders called events, for_sale, and official_notices. The user announce has all permissions on all the mailboxes in the hierarchy. We also want the sub-folders to be readable by everyone on the Cyrus system, and we want only two users, johndoe and msmith, to append messages to the sub-folders. To allow those two users to post messages to the sub-folders, the ACLs on the sub-folders should look like:
localhost> lam user.announce.events
announce lrswipcda
msmith p
johndoe p
anyone lr
johndoe and msmith can append mail directly to any of the mailboxes in the hierarchy via IMAP by using the "+" notation. For example, to post a message directly to the events mailbox, johndoe or msmith would send a message to:
The deliver program would append the message to the events folder in the announce mailbox. If any other user attempts to append mail directly to one of the shared folders, it will end up in announce 's inbox, where only announce can see it.
In order for a user to post mail to a mailbox using the + notation, that user must have p access rights on the mailbox.
That implies that the ACL on the top-level mailbox must be set more strictly than the events, for_sale, and official_notices. First, we create the top-level mailboxes and the sub-folders:
localhost> createmailbox user.announce
By default, the user.announce mailbox is created with an ACL that grants all rights to the mailbox owner, announce. Because we don't want other users to view the mailbox, no change in the ACL is necessary on the top-level mailbox:
localhost> createmailbox user.announce.events
localhost> createmailbox user.announce.for_sale
localhost> createmailbox user.announce.official_notices
Finally, set the ACL on each sub-folder to allow everyone read and list access, and msmith and johndoe permission to post messages to the mailboxes (repeat the last three commands for msmith):
localhost> setaclmailbox user.announce.events anyone lr
localhost> setaclmailbox user.announce.for_sale anyone lr
localhost> setaclmailbox user.announce.official_notices anyone lr
localhost> setaclmailbox user.announce.events johndoe p
localhost> setaclmailbox user.announce.for_sale johndoe p
localhost> setaclmailbox user.announce.official_notices johndoe p
If you use a shared folder to provide a group of staff members with a forum, distribute your workload--delegate someone as the shared folder or bulletin board owner. Give that person all access rights, so that person can manage the mailbox's ACL and its permissions as changes in staff occur.
Implementing Bulletin Boards
As with shared folders, the first step in creating a bulletin board is to create a mailbox that will be used as the bulletin board. After creating the mailbox, set the ACL--the ACL should have the l and r bits set so that the users can see and read the mailbox. If users are allowed to post to the bulletin board, then the p bit should also be set. If they are allowed to store messages they have seen in the bulletin board, then the s bit should be set.
If your installation's sendmail configuration was built using the cyrus-proto.mc M4 file that came with the sendmail distribution, mail sent to bb+mailboxname will be delivered to the bulletin board.
Sites that use some MTA other than sendmail should take a look at the deliver (8) manpage for details on how to invoke deliver to allow postings to the bulletin board.
A Word of Warning . . .
d (delete) rights should be used on bulletin boards and shared folders with caution. While d rights may be granted with the intention of allowing a user to delete messages in the folder or bulletin board, d rights also enable the user to delete the folder or bulletin board itself. When the folder or bulletin board is deleted, incoming mail bounces. The problem has been known for some time and is fixed in Cyrus Version 2.0, due to be released soon. Although the problem cannot necessarily be considered a bug, a fix exists that can be applied to versions of the source code prior to 2.0 to allow d rights yet prevent users from deleting the folder itself.
The fix involves changing code that checks the user's ACL in imap/mailboxlist.c in the mboxlist_deletemailbox function. The code provided in the Cyrus distribution checks the user's ACL for d rights before allowing him to delete a mailbox. By changing the code to test for a rights instead of d rights, a user can still be allowed to delete messages in the folder, but must have administrative rights added to his ACL before he can delete the folder. There are two ACL tests in mboxlist_deletemailbox, shown in Example 9-3.
Example 9-3: The Offending Code from mboxlist.c (Cyrus IMAP Version 1.5.19)
mboxlist_deletemailbox(name, isadmin, userid, auth_state, checkacl)
char *name;
int isadmin;
char *userid;
struct auth_state *auth_state;
int checkacl;
(Lines deleted for brevity...)
/* Check ACL before doing anything stupid
* We don't have to lie about the error code since we know
* the user is an admin.
if (!(acl_myrights(auth_state, acl) & ACL_DELETE)) {
return IMAP_PERMISSION_DENIED;
(More lines of code deleted...)
access = acl_myrights(auth_state, acl);
if (checkacl && !(access & ACL_DELETE)) {
mboxlist_unlock( );
The same code, with the fix applied (in boldface type), is shown in Example 9-4.
Example 9-4: Fixed mailboxlist.c
mboxlist_deletemailbox(name, isadmin, userid, auth_state, checkacl)
char *name;
int isadmin;
char *userid;
struct auth_state *auth_state;
int checkacl;
(Lines deleted for brevity...)
/* Check ACL before doing anything stupid
* We don't have to lie about the error code since we know
* the user is an admin.
if (!(acl_myrights(auth_state, acl) & ACL_ADMIN)) {
return IMAP_PERMISSION_DENIED;
(More lines of code deleted...)
access = acl_myrights(auth_state, acl);
if (checkacl && !(access & ACL_ADMIN)) {
mboxlist_unlock( );
Mailstore Partitioning
Cyrus scales well as your storage requirements grow. Scaling is accomplished by spreading the mailstore across filesystems. New partitions can be added to the mailstore at any time without requiring downtime,[3] copying of files, or even the users' knowledge.
The default Cyrus configuration requires two properties related to mailstore partitioning in /etc/imapd.conf :
partition-default: /var/spool/cyrus
defaultpartition: default
Under this default configuration, when a new mailbox is created, it inherits the partition of its parent mailbox. If the new mailbox does not have a parent mailbox, then the mailbox is placed on the default partition partition-default.
Depending on the specifics of the hardware configuration, the system administrator may want to distribute the mailstore across several disks. Suppose, for example, a system with a single disk for its mailstore reached 90% of its disk capacity, and the administrator added two disks and a new disk controller. In this case, the system administrator would probably decide to keep her mailstore partitioning as simple as possible and add a new partition for each new disk.[4] After adding the new hardware to the system, formatting the disks, and mounting the new partitions, the administrator would create a user subdirectory under each new partition and change /etc/imapd.conf to look like:
partition-default: /var/spool/cyrus
partition-1: /var/spool/cyrus1
partition-2: /var/spool/cyrus2
defaultpartition: default
To add new accounts to one of the new partitions, the administrator would need to specify the partition name as an argument to the createmailbox command. If she does not specify the partition, the mailbox is created on the default partition. For example, using cyradm interactively, give the command:
localhost> createmailbox user.marydoe 1
The createmailbox command creates a new account for marydoe and, because
partition-1is located on the filesystem /var/spool/cyrus1, places marydoe 's mailbox in /var/spool/cyrus1/user/marydoe/.
To move existing accounts to other partitions, the rename script (Example 9-2) could be used. There is also a very useful public domain IMAP tool, fast.imap (see Chapter 18, IMAP Tools), which can be used to manually move or automatically balance mailboxes across partitions.
A common partitioning scheme that is used at many sites involves dividing the mailstore into 26 partitions, one for each letter in the alphabet. Users are then assigned to the partition that corresponds to the first letter of their last name. Although many sites do this to make the system more scalable or to work around filesystem limits, we don't recommend it. The problem with the alphabet partitioning scheme is that you're likely to get an uneven distribution of mailboxes across partitions; e.g., your "m" partition might fill up before your "z" partition. Additionally, having a large number of small partitions makes the system more complex and difficult to manage. Careful configuration of the system makes this sort of partitioning scheme unnecessary. Keeping a smaller number of partitions keeps the system scalable without making it more complex than it has to be.
Quota Maintenance
On occasion, quotas will get horked. A common corrupted quota scenario goes like this: a user receives alerts from his client that he cannot save mail to his folders.[5] You use cyradm to check his quota, and everything looks fine--he has plenty of space. However, you check a little deeper and you see that his mail is being deferred to the queue and is not being delivered to his mailbox, which usually happens when a user is over quota. A quick way to determine whether the problem is quota-related is to use the quota command to fix the user's quota root (run the command as user cyrus from the shell prompt):
$ quota user.username
After running quota, run cyradm and check the quota again. Chances are that it will report the user as being over quota when you run it this time.
The quota command, when run with no command-line arguments, can also be used to report quota limits and usage on your entire user base:
$ quota
Quota % Used Used Root
15360 0 0 user.aa0002
15360 0 0 user.aa0006
15360 0 137 user.aa0008
15360 0 0 user.aa0009
If quotas become corrupted, all that is required to fix the problem is to run the quota command with the -f switch:
$ quota -f
The command may require several minutes to complete, depending on the number of users your system supports. More information on quota subsystem maintenance is provided in later in the chapter.
Disaster Recovery
Anticipate disaster! The best approach you can take is a proactive approach. Here are some things you can do to be prepared.
Checkpoint Your mailboxes File
Reconstructing the mailboxes file is time-consuming, but you can avoid reconstructing that file from scratch. Save a history of past versions of the mailboxes file periodically on disk so that you can go back in small increments of time to the last good copy of the mailboxes file. True, it may be a few minutes too old to bring your system back to its exact state before the problems started, but in most cases that is better than bringing the system down for several hours to reconstruct the mailboxes file. Saving one copy of the file is not useful--suppose the corruption in the mailboxes surfaced hours ago, and you've been backing up the corrupt file every five minutes since then? To be on the safe side, save each set of files on a separate physical disk. Even better yet, save two copies in two different physical locations. Save as often as possible, as often as every few minutes. A script for rotating the mailboxes file is given in Example 9-5 later in this chapter.
Back Up Your Data
Have a good backup strategy. While reliable backups are essential, the ability to recover files on demand is equally important. Are you prepared to restore any part of your system right now? If so, document where the data is kept and how to recover it.
Be Prepared for More than One Disaster
Disasters can happen simultaneously at more than one level in your infrastructure. What would you do if you lost both your tape backup system and your mail server at the same time? Document your infrastructure--what systems and services does Cyrus depend on? Include one or more extra Cyrus servers that can take over while the primary server is being recovered.
Keep Hard Copies of Your Configuration
If a disk containing part of your Cyrus system is lost, you must be prepared to install a new disk, rebuild the filesystem on the new disk, and restore data. To rebuild the disk, you need to know how the filesystems were laid out on the disk and how much space was allocated to each partition. Keeping hard copies of configuration data, such as your IMAP server configuration file or your MTA configuration, can make recovery of the server much easier if for some reason you must install it from scratch. Useful information to keep in hard copy includes:
- Partition tables from the format command
- Output of the df command
- /etc/vfstab or /etc/fstab
- /etc/imapd.conf
- sendmail.mc
- RAID configuration files
- Automounter configuration files
Disasters and Recovery Strategies
In this section, we'll look at some common disasters and how to recover from those disasters.
Corruption or inconsistency in the mailboxes file
As we learned in Chapter 7, Installing the Cyrus IMAP Server, the /var/imap/mailboxes file is critical to the operation of the Cyrus system. Fortunately, Cyrus comes with a utility, reconstruct, that can be used to rebuild the mailboxes file in case of loss or corruption.
The reconstruct utility must always run as user cyrus ! If run as root or another user, it will reset the ownership of the mailbox and the mailboxes will no longer be accessible.
Shut down imapd before running reconstruct. Comment out the imapd entry in /etc/inetd.conf, and send a HUP signal to the inetd process to turn off imapd. Then, as user cyrus, run the reconstruct utility with the -m switch:
$ reconstruct -m
The -m argument tells reconstruct to correct the system-wide mailboxes file, if possible. After correcting mailboxes, reconstruct checks each partition defined in /etc/imapd.conf for mailboxes, and adds them to mailboxes if necessary. When reconstruct finishes its work, uncomment imapd in /etc/inetd.conf and send another HUP signal to inetd to turn imapd back on.
Be aware that on a system with a large number of users, reconstruct can take quite some time to run.[6] It is strongly recommended that on all Cyrus systems, but especially on large systems, you checkpoint your mailboxes file to an alternate disk periodically throughout the day and that you keep copies going several hours back. The mailboxes file changes when:
- A new user account is created
- A mailbox is created or deleted
- A quota root changes
- A mailbox's ACL changes
If your system has a large number of users, or your users are very active, your mailboxes file changes often. For systems with an active mailboxes file, checkpointing the mailboxes file every 5 or 10 minutes is recommended. Having a good copy of mailboxes around will help you avoid taking time to recover the file from tape and will save hours of downtime by making a reconstruct of the complete mailboxes file unnecessary. Always try replacing the corrupted mailboxes file with the backed-up copy before running reconstruct. If the file is current enough, chances are that it will suffice and the entire file will not need to be rebuilt. Example 9-5 shows a script for rotating the mailboxes file.
Example 9-5: Script to Rotate the mailboxes File
$file = "/var/cyrus/mailboxes";
$gzip = "/usr/local/bin/gzip";
$maxrot = 60;
$suffix = "gz";
if (! -e $file) { print "$file does not exist! exiting.\n"; exit; }
$rot = $maxrot;
while ($rot >= 0) {
$rotn = $rot + 1;
if (-e "$file.$rot.$suffix") {
rename "$file.$rot.$suffix", "$file.$rotn.$suffix";
$rot = $rot - 1;
`cp $file $file.0`;
`$gzip $file.0`;
On less active systems, backing up mailboxes once per hour should be sufficient. If you have a very small number of users, reconstruct runs quickly and it's not really necessary to checkpoint your mailboxes file.
reconstruct does not adjust the quota usage recorded in the quota root files. After reconstructing or recovering the mailboxes file, it's always necessary to rebuild the quota subsystem using the quota -f command.
Corruption in a user's mailbox
On occasion, you will encounter inconsistencies in individual mailbox directories. reconstruct can also be used to recover from inconsistencies in mailboxes and mailbox hierarchies. To rebuild a single mailbox without affecting any other mailboxes in the same hierarchy, run reconstruct with the mailbox name as an argument. Remember, reconstruct must be run as the cyrus user:
$ reconstruct user.johndoe
To rebuild a mailbox and all mailboxes below it in its local hierarchy, use the -r argument to reconstruct:
$ reconstruct -r user.johndoe
reconstruct first checks the mailbox for cyrus.header and cyrus.index files. If the files exist, then reconstruct recovers information from those files that it cannot gather from the message files, such as the date stamp and flag names and states. reconstruct recovers information from the message files themselves that it cannot find in the header and cache files.
Inconsistency in quotas
On rare occasions, a mailbox will wind up with the wrong quota root. When this happens, the cyradm listquota command will report an incorrect quota usage. A good indication that something in the quota system has gone haywire is when a user's mail is bouncing with "Deferred--quota exceeded" errors, but listquota reports that the usage is below the limit. The Cyrus distribution includes a tool, quota (8), for maintaining the consistency of the quota subsystem.
You may recall from Chapter 6 that the Cyrus quota subsystem is comprised of a directory in the Cyrus configuration area that contains a set of text files, one file per quota root. The association between a mailbox and a quota root is not made in the quota subsystem--that information is maintained in the mailboxes file. Each quota file, which is named after the quota root, contains the quota root's quota usage (in bytes) and quota limit (in kilobytes). Here is an example of a quota file:
$ cd /var/imap/quota
$ cat user.aa0006
The first line of user.aa0006 is the quota usage, in bytes; the second line is the quota limit, in kilobytes.
If we go to the mailboxes file and look for the quota root user.aa0006, we can find all mailboxes that it applies to. Here is an excerpt from the mailboxes file. The first field in the line is the mailbox name, the second is the partition on which the mailbox resides, the third field is the quota root (sans the "user." prefix), and the last field is the mailbox's ACL:
user.aa0006 default aa0006 lrswipcda
user.aa0006.Drafts default aa0006 lrswipcda
user.aa0006.Trash default aa0006 lrswipcda
user.aa0006.sent-mail default aa0006 lrswipcda
The quota program, when run with the -f option, fixes inconsistencies in the quota subsystem by recalculating the quota root of each mailbox and the quota usage of each quota root:
$ quota -f
The quota command first repairs the quota subsystem, then reports its results after all repairs have been made. The results include the quota root, its usage before the consistency check, and its usage after the repairs:
user.aa0002: usage was 0, now 307223
user.aa0006: usage was 5181, now 4052251
user.aa0030: usage was 105945, now 5446403
user.aad0006: usage was 0, now 6261
user.aadavis: usage was 0, now 8239
The Cyrus distribution does not include a tool for removing a quota root. To remove a quota root without removing the mailbox it is associated with, you must remove the quota root's file from the /var/imap/quota directory, then run the quota command to make the quota subsystem consistent:
$ rm /var/imap/quota/user.aa0002
$ quota -f
It is advisable to run the quota command periodically (e.g., once per week) out of cron to keep the quota subsystem in a consistent state.
Loss of a disk
You heeded our advice and saved copies of your disk configurations, so you know how the partitions were laid out on the disk and what each one is used for. Here are the steps to follow:
- Replace the disk.
- Boot your system to single-user mode.
- Rebuild the filesystem on the new disk and determine that you can mount each partition on its usual mount point.
- Restore data to the new filesystem.
- Arrange your startup scripts so that sendmail does not start up when the system boots, and comment out the entry for imapd in /etc/inetd.conf.
- If you recovered data that included the mailboxes file or any part of a mailbox, then run reconstruct.
- Reboot the system. If the system comes up with all partitions mounted, then start sendmail and uncomment the entry for imapd in /etc/inetd.conf.
Migration from Berkeley (Unix) Mailbox Format to Cyrus
Unix systems and the out-of-the-box UW IMAP server both store mail messages in Berkeley mail format (also referred to as mbox, Unix, or /var/mail format) mail folders. Many sites that use Berkeley format move their users onto a Cyrus server to take advantage of the quota and ACL support that Cyrus offers. In this section, we'll walk though the steps involved in such a migration. Source code for the tools we used to accomplish the migration are provided in Appendix A.
How Do I Know My Mail Is Berkeley Format?
If your mail setup matches six out of seven of the criteria below, then you're storing mail in Berkeley format:
- There is no mail server--users log on to a Unix machine and run a mail program to read their mail.
- There is a mail server, but it's the UW IMAP server, running out-of-the-box with no special site configuration.
- Each user's incoming mail is stored in a spool directory, such as /var/mail or /var/spool/mail.
- Each user's incoming mail is stored within a single file, named after the user.
- Mail folders are stored in the user's home directory.
- Mail reading is done with programs such as Elm, PINE, mail (1), rmail (1), or mailx (1).
- Each mail folder contains a header, blank line, and message body, and delimits messages with the From header line.[7]
When converting a production mail system to Cyrus, several issues need to be taken into consideration to make the conversion go smoothly.
User-driven versus batch conversion
Will you take responsibility for moving your users over to the Cyrus server, or will you put some utility in place to allow them to do it on their own? If moving to Cyrus is optional, it might be easier on you if the users migrate their own mail to the new server. A one-time, all-or-none conversion might be optional in your circumstances. If you don't have another immediate need for the old machine and can keep both the old and new machines running simultaneously, then you could take advantage of a user-driven conversion. The size of your user base plays a role, too--user-driven conversion is much easier to manage in a small user base. In a larger user base, it becomes difficult to get everyone to move their mail before your deadline.
If you are constrained to providing mail service on the new Cyrus server immediately, then you will need to move all your users at one time in batch mode.
Downtime is a serious consideration for sites that depend on Cyrus as a production mail server. You may decide to bypass the issue of downtime completely and move one or two users at a time over a period of months until everyone has been moved to the Cyrus server. Some sites do not have the infrastructure or hardware to support that strategy. Those sites will need to move all users from the old system to Cyrus in one fell swoop.
Downtime can be considerable if the migration is not planned carefully. If downtime is a serious issue, then a dry run of your migration plan is advisable.
It's all or nothing!
Once you've migrated users to your Cyrus system and start delivering mail to the system, it is possible, but time-consuming, to revert to Berkeley mail. Be prepared to revert to your old system if something goes terribly wrong mid-migration. Tools for backing out of a conversion are provided later in this chapter.
Unfortunately, there are no generic migration tools good for both large and small user bases. Mark Crispin at the University of Washington developed a set of tools that includes mailbox conversion programs (see Chapter 18). The UW tools can be used to migrate a small number of mailboxes. However, those tools use the IMAP protocol to move mail around and require authentication for each user being converted, making them unsuitable for a mass migration. Those tools are somewhat problematic to use for conversion to Cyrus, and after a few days of working with them unsuccessfully, we found it easier to write our own tools. In this chapter, we provide generic tools that are good for user-driven and both large and small batch conversions.
Backward compatibility
You may be supporting features that could become problematic on a Cyrus server, such as server-side mail filtering or .forward files. Keep those features in mind when you're drawing up your migration plans.
User -Driven Conversion
Users can copy their own Berkeley-format incoming mailbox and mail folders into a Cyrus mailbox using the Perl script, user2cyrus, shown in Example 9-6. The script makes the transfer using IMAP, so the Berkeley folder and Cyrus server need not reside on the same machine. The script does assume that each user already has an account on the Cyrus server.
If the user runs user2cyrus while she has an IMAP client open, she may need to exit and restart the client to see the new mailbox and messages.
To provide user2cyrus to your users, you would need to install it somewhere public, like /usr/local/bin, on the machine where the Berkeley format folders reside. The script automatically skips the first message in the Berkeley folder to avoid copying the "FOLDER INTERNAL DATA" message. If you want to copy the message, then edit the script as you wish.
user2cyrus requires the NetxAP Perl module, which is freely available from CPAN.
Example 9-6: The user2cyrus Script
# This is a modified version of a public domain script written by
# Steve Snodgrass (firstname.lastname@example.com).
# user2cyrus - Dump a user's Unix mail file into a Cyrus mailbox
# Usage: user2cyrus mbox
# Input: Name of an RFC 822 mail folder
# Dependency: NetxAP Perl module from CPAN
use File::Basename;
use Net::IMAP;
# Set this to the hostname of your IMAP server
$IMAPSERVER = "europa.acs.unt.edu";
$mbox = "$ARGV[0]";
if (!$mbox) { die "Usage: $0 mbox\n"; }
chop ($whoami = `/usr/ucb/whoami`);
if ($whoami eq "root" || $whoami eq "cyrus") {
die "This script cannot be run by a privileged user!\n";
# Main Code
# Log in to Cyrus IMAP server
($user, $pass) = GetLogin( );
$imap = new Net::IMAP($IMAPSERVER, Synchronous => 1);
$response = $imap->login($user, $pass);
print "Login: ", $response->status, "-",
$response->status_text, "\n";
# cyrmailbox is the mailbox name on the Cyrus server
$cyrmailbox = "user." . "$user." . basename($mbox);
# Create the new mailbox. If the mailbox already exists, do not
# allow its contents to be overwritten!
$response = $imap->create($cyrmailbox);
print "Create: ", $response->status, "-",
$response->status_text, "\n";
if ($response->status eq "NO") {
print "Mailbox $cyrmailbox already exists on Cyrus server!\n";
print "Rename your file and try again.\n";
$response = $imap->logout( );
print "Logout: ", $response->status, "-",
$response->status_text, "\n";
# Copy the mbox
if (-s $mbox) {
TransferMbox($imap, $cyrmailbox, $mbox);
# Disconnect from IMAP server
$response = $imap->logout( );
print "Logout: ", $response->status, "-",
$response->status_text, "\n";
# Get username and password information
sub GetLogin {
my ($username, $password);
print "Enter your IMAP username: ";
chop ($username = <STDIN>);
system "stty -echo";
print "Enter your IMAP password: ";
chop ($password = <STDIN>);
system "stty echo";
print "\n";
return ($username, $password);
# Dump a Unix-style mbox file into a Cyrus folder
sub TransferMbox {
my ($imap, $mailbox, $mboxfile) = @_;
my $blank = 1;
my $count = 0;
my $message = "";
my $response;
print "Transferring $mboxfile...\n";
open(MBOX, $mboxfile);
while (<MBOX>) {
if ($blank && /^From /) {
if ($message) {
chop $message; # Remove extra blank line before next From
$response = $imap->append($mailbox, $message) if $count;
$message = "";
else {
s/$/\r\n/; # IMAP requires CR/LF on each line
$message .= $_;
$blank = /^\r$/ ? 1 : 0;
$response = $imap->append($mailbox, $message) if $count;
print "Transferred $count messages from $mboxfile to
Batch Conversion: An Example and Tools
Batch conversion from a Berkeley system to a Cyrus system can be done in two different ways:
- Extract and copy
- Create the complete, empty mailbox hierarchy on the Cyrus server, then split the Berkeley-style folders into separate RFC 822 messages and copy them into the appropriate mailbox on the Cyrus system. Once all messages have been copied, reconstruct each mailbox hierarchy.
- Extract and deliver
- Similar to extract and copy, but instead of copying the extracted mail messages directly into the Cyrus mailboxes, they are piped into the deliver program. deliver places the messages in the appropriate mailbox and updates the mailbox header and cache files, making it unnecessary to reconstruct each mailbox hierarchy. There is overhead involved in using deliver (the state files must be updated with each message) that makes this method slower than extract and copy.
Batch conversions could be done using a utility similar to the user2cyrus utility shown in Example 9-6, but there is a drawback: it's nearly 75% slower in real time than an extract and copy. If you have more than 1,000 users to convert, you should probably rule it out.
The extract and copy method is the most direct and requires the least amount of downtime, making it the best option for large-scale migrations. It saves time by avoiding use of the protocol and a third-party delivery agent and by allowing some of the work (such as creating the mailbox hierarchies) to be done before taking the system down. Because this method directly manipulates the mailbox database, it is also a good opportunity to learn the mechanics of the Cyrus system. For those reasons, we will examine the extract and copy approach.
The starting point for the conversion is a text file listing usernames of the accounts to be converted. The procedure for conversion from a Unix to a Cyrus system consists of the following steps:
- Shut down imapd and sendmail.
- Create an IMAP account for each user on the list.
- Create an empty Cyrus mailbox on the new system for each mail folder that resides on the old system.
- Transfer messages from the old incoming mailbox to the Cyrus incoming mailbox.
- Transfer messages from the old mail folders into the new mailboxes on the Cyrus server.
- Reconstruct the Cyrus mailboxes file.
- Restart imapd and sendmail.
In the rest of the section, we will walk through an actual conversion, using the tools provided in Appendix A. As we go along, we'll also list the output and results of each step. For simplicity's sake, our example will move only one user. Note that the procedure is the same whether you have a few accounts or thousands (we have run this identical procedure on 20,000 accounts in one batch).
Step 1: Shut down imapd and sendmail
Chaos can result if mail is delivered to the Cyrus system while the conversion is underway. Be sure to turn off both imapd and sendmail before proceeding any further.
Step 2: Create the new accounts
Creating IMAP accounts in advance can save up to several hours of downtime.
First, save the list of usernames you're going to convert in a text file. We saved the usernames we're converting in a text file called users.txt, and that's the file used throughout the examples in this chapter. Once you have your text file, create a Cyrus IMAP account for each user in users.txt. This involves two steps:
- Set up authentication for your users. If you use Unix authentication, add the users (or NIS/NIS+ usernames or netgroups) to the local password file. If you plan to run your Cyrus system as a black box, assign each user a null shell, such as /bin/false, to prevent them from logging in and snooping around. If your site authenticates using a SASL mechanism, such as Kerberos or CRAM-MD5, it's not necessary to add the users to the password file. If you use an alternative to Unix authentication, then Unix accounts are not required for your users. Chapter 8 has more information on how to set up authentication for your users.
- Create an IMAP account for each user. A handy Tcl script for creating new IMAP accounts, addusers, is given in Example 9-1. This step can be performed while both the new and the old systems are up and running:
# addusers users.txt
The result of Step 2 is that each user on the list now has a top-level mailbox (INBOX) with the default ACL or, in other words, an account on the Cyrus system.
Step 3: Create Cyrus mail folders
The next step, creating empty mailboxes that correspond to folders, is a bit more involved. To understand what the goal is here, see Figure 9-1. The figure shows how johndoe 's incoming mailbox and mail folders on a Berkeley mail format system map to Cyrus mailboxes.
Figure 9-1. Mapping of johndoe's Berkeley mail folders to Cyrus mailboxes
As the figure shows, johndoe 's incoming mailbox and each of his folders must be converted into a Cyrus mailbox. The Cyrus mailbox format is different from Berkeley format in several ways. For one, it's hierarchical--the incoming mailbox is the root of the tree, and the folders and sub-folders are branches. The other difference is that Berkeley format mail folders contain many mail messages within a single file, whereas Cyrus folders store each message in a separate file. Another difference is that the Cyrus account holder does not own his own mail folders--they're owned by the Cyrus system. The details of the Cyrus mailbox format were covered in Chapter 6.
Because Cyrus mail format is so different from Berkeley format, some preparation work must be done before you actually create the empty mailboxes. First, you have to find the pathnames of all the Berkeley format folders that belong to the user and map them into mailbox names in the Cyrus namespace. Using johndoe as an example, we could look up his home directory in the password file and, knowing that, find all the folders in his ~/Mail directory, then translate those folder names into Cyrus mailbox names.
The mapping from Berkeley folder names into the Cyrus namespace is accomplished using the Perl script, bsd2cyrus. bsd2cyrus does nothing more than formulate a list of Cyrus mailbox names--the output of bsd2cyrus is to be fed into another script later on to create the actual mailboxes.
To run the script and redirect its output to a file, mailboxes.txt (for later use in the other conversion scripts), use the command:
# bsd2cyrus users.txt > mailboxes.txt
Save the output of bsd2cyrus in a text file and keep it for later reference. Other conversion tools will rely on it for input, and it's the only correlation you'll have between Berkeley folder pathnames and Cyrus mailbox names.
There are several points worth noting about the bsd2cyrus script:
- The script expects that each user's mail folders are stored in a subdirectory off the user's home directory on the Berkeley system. In the examples in this chapter, that subdirectory is ~/mail. The script also expects that the user's home directories will be mounted temporarily on the Cyrus machine for the duration of the conversion.
- There is always the possibility that folders on the Berkeley system may have content that is not RFC 822 compliant (e.g., they might be compressed files, executables, or subdirectories). Such folders are ignored by bsd2cyrus. You always have the option of going back and handling the exceptions.
- You may recall from Chapter 6 that Cyrus does not support special characters in mailbox names. bsd2cyrus converts all characters except alphabetic characters, digits, underscore, and dash to their ASCII representation preceded by an underscore. For example, user diannam 's Berkeley folder name mail&news would become user.diannam.mail_046news on the Cyrus system (046 is the ASCII representation of the character "&").
The output of the bsd2cyrus script will be used as input into two other scripts, which perform the following:
- Create the new, empty folders on the Cyrus system
- Convert the contents of the old BSD mail folders to Cyrus format and insert the mail into the new mailboxes
Let's look at what the bsd2cyrus script does. Our user, diannam, has several BSD mail folders on the old system:
% ls -aF
. binaryfile* how spacy s.me
.. compressed.Z s!me same
.hidden directory/ s&me saved
Trash gzip.gz s*me sent
After running the script, take a look at its output:
# cat mailboxes.txt
Note that the script is designed to ignore certain files, such as hidden files, directories, binary files, and empty files--that is why some files in the directory are not found in mailboxes.txt. As you can see in the output, the script renamed the new folders using the ASCII representation of the special characters.
Next, feed the bsd2cyrus output into the createfolders script. createfolders is a Tcl script that creates empty Cyrus mailboxes. This work must be done with Tcl script, because the command to create a new mailbox on a Cyrus system is a cyradm command--you may recall that cyradm is an extended Tcl interpreter. The createfolders script is shown in Example A-2 in Appendix A.
Here's the output of createfolders when we run it on the mailboxes.txt file that we saved earlier:
# createfolders mailboxes.txt
Connected to IMAP server. Authenticating...
Authentication successful.
Created mailbox user.diannam.sent-mail
Created mailbox user.diannam.saved-messages
Created mailbox user.diannam.same
Created mailbox user.diannam.s_041me
Created mailbox user.diannam.s_052me
Created mailbox user.diannam.Trash
Created mailbox user.diannam.s_046me
Created mailbox user.diannam.s_056me
Step 4: Transfer messages from old inbox to new inbox
Now that the framework of mailbox hierarchies is in place, the next step is to populate the top-level mailboxes with messages from the Berkeley inbox on the old system. The inboxfer script copies mail from the Berkeley inbox into the Cyrus INBOX. The script is shown in Example A-3. It takes the filename of your list of users (users.txt in our examples) as input. The usage is:
# inboxfer users.txt
Step 5: Transfer messages from old folders to Cyrus folders
Once the Berkeley inboxes have been migrated to the Cyrus system, we turn to the Berkeley-format folders. The script in Example A-5 copies the content of Berkeley-format folders on the old system, converts it to Cyrus-friendly format, and copies it into the appropriate empty Cyrus folder on the Cyrus system. The usage of the folderxfer script is:
$ folderxfer mailboxes.txt
Again, you use the mailboxes.txt file that we created with the bsd2cyrus script as input.
Step 6: Reconstruct the new mailboxes
The final step once everything has been copied over is to reconstruct each user's mailbox hierarchy. reconstruct can only be run as the cyrus user, so before running the reconstruct command, you must change the ownership of all mailboxes to user cyrus and group mail :
# chown -R cyrus:mail /var/spool/imap/user
If you have a large number of users, the chown command may take an hour or so to complete. Once the permissions have been changed, run the batchreconstruct script shown in Example A-6. The usage is:
$ batchreconstruct users.txt
Step 7: Restart imapd and sendmail
At this point, all mail has been moved to the Cyrus system. Uncomment the
imapdentry in /etc/inetd.conf, restart inetd, and restart sendmail.
Backing Out
Things don't always go as planned, and so we provide you with a way to back out of Cyrus and go back to Berkeley-format mailboxes.
We once began a conversion from the UW server to a commercial IMAP server based on CMU Cyrus. We were concerned with the amount of time it would take to convert our 20,000-user base to the new server. The company's technical staff assured us that, using their conversion tools, it wouldn't take more than a day to have our users up and running on the new server. We made the very expensive mistake of blindly trusting their assurances and based our entire plan on their prediction of our downtime. We warned our users of the downtime, prepared our data, and on the big day, took our old system offline and started the conversion scripts provided to us by the developers at the company. Twelve hours later, after only 265 users had been converted, we realized we were in deep water and decided to back out. Example 9-7 is the script we threw together on the spot and used to grab the converted mail and put it back where it came from.
Example 9-7: revert
$formail = "/usr/local/bin/formail";
$base = "/var/spool/imap/user";
$spool = "/var/mail";
open (USERLIST, "$ARGV[0]") || die "$!";
while (<USERLIST>) {
print "$_\n";
opendir(DIR,"$base/$user") || die;
@files = readdir(DIR);
closedir DIR;
open (BSDMAILBOX,">>$spool/$user") || next;
foreach $file (@files) {
next if $file eq '..';
next if $file eq '.';
flock (BSDMAILBOX,$LOCK_EX);
if ($file =~ /\.$/) {
open(FORMAIL,"$formail < $base/$user/$file |")
|| die;
while (<FORMAIL>) {
$_ =~ s/^M//g;
print BSDMAILBOX $_;
close FORMAIL;
flock (BSDMAILBOX,$LOCK_UN);
close BSDMAILBOX;
close USERLIST;
After our horrendous experience, we attempted to develop our own conversion tools and give it another try. However, the server's value-added features and proprietary twists kept our conversion code from working as expected. We gave up and installed the open source Cyrus server instead. The tools we developed worked like a charm with Cyrus and gave us more appreciation than ever for the fruits of the open source community.
Mail Forwarding and Filtering on a Black Box
The Cyrus server is intended to run as a black box. Because users have no home directories on the Cyrus server, they cannot enable mail forwarding by creating a .forward file.
How is forwarding done without .forward files? You guessed it--user mail forwarding is from within the sendmail aliases database on a Cyrus system. To make maintenance easier, you can keep the user aliases and the system aliases in separate files:
- System aliases should be kept in the standard /etc/mail/aliases file.
- Users' mail forwarding orders should be stored in another file (or files), defined in your local sendmail configuration.
Let's suppose that we will store users' forwarding orders in an alias file that's named /etc/mail/forward. The format of the /etc/mail/forward file is the same as the sendmail aliases file format. To activate the /etc/mail/forward file, edit your M4 file (sendmail ships with an example, cyrusproto.mc, or you may have rolled your own) and add the following line:
define('ALIAS_FILE', '/etc/mail/aliases,/etc/mail/forward')
Finally, build a new sendmail.cf file and restart sendmail. If you don't use an M4 macro to build your sendmail.cf file, then edit your sendmail.cf file and look for the lines:
# location of alias file
O AliasFile=/etc/mail/aliases
Change the definition of
O AliasFile=/etc/mail/aliases,/etc/mail/forward
Because users cannot log in and directly edit their forwarding orders, they need to be allowed to edit their forwarding orders via a web form or some other indirect method.
Migrating existing .forward files to aliases
.forward files have to be taken into account during a conversion process from a Berkeley-style mail system to Cyrus. The Perl script in Example 9-8, fwd2alias, finds .forward files for a list of users and converts the contents of the .forward files into an aliases file. Run the script on your Berkeley or UW mail system. The aliases file that the script produces should be moved to your Cyrus server's /etc/mail directory and incorporated into your sendmail configuration as described earlier in this section.
Example 9-8: fwd2alias
open (USERS,"users.txt") || die "$!";
open (OUTFILE,">/tmp/forward") || die "$!";
while (<PR>) {
= getpwnam($_);
open (FW,"$dir/.forward") || warn "can't open $dir/.forward";
chop ($address = <FW>);
print OUTFILE "$_:$address\n";
close FW;
close USERS;
close OUTFILE;
.forward support
If you simply must allow use of .forward files for one reason or another, then you can mount home directories on the Cyrus server and tweak your sendmail configuration to enable support for .forward files (sendmail 's cyrusproto.mc file comes with support for .forward files disabled).
To enable .forward support, add the users to the /etc/passwd file, if necessary (for example, if you're using an authentication mechanism that does not require that the users have Unix accounts). .forward forwarding will not work unless the users have Unix logins.
Edit your sendmail M4 file and find the line:
On the line immediately following, add the statement:
The w flag tells sendmail that users exist in /etc/passwd and that it should look for a ~/.forward in the user's home directory.
Server -Side Mail Filtering with procmail
procmail is a popular Unix mail filtering utility used to perform server-side mail filtering. On Cyrus servers, the mail storage format makes it difficult for individual users to use procmail to filter and sort incoming messages into mailboxes. Traditionally, the user invokes procmail from their .forward, which doesn't exist on a black box server.
We've seen that it is indeed possible to allow users to use .forward files with the Cyrus IMAP server. If a user were to invoke procmail from a .forward file, he would have to use the Cyrus deliver program in his procmail rules file to deposit mail into his mailbox. In order for that to even be possible, the permissions on the deliver program would have to be changed to allow any user to run it (normally, it can only be run by user cyrus). Changing permissions in that way puts the integrity of the system at risk--we've mentioned before that the Cyrus system is finicky about ownership and permissions. It also opens a gaping security hole, essentially allowing any user to insert mail into any other user's mailbox by filtering the mail either directly or through an intermediate program.
Obviously, invoking procmail out of .forward is something to be avoided. Instead, users' mail-filtering rules could be stored centrally in a subdirectory under /var/imap (the examples in this chapter will be stored under /var/imap/procmail ) and owned by the Cyrus system. To edit his rules, the user would log in to an authenticated CGI that runs as user cyrus.
The setup that is described in this section has the following essential features:
- sendmail calls procmail, not deliver, as a delivery agent.
- procmail reads a global procmail rules file and calls Cyrus deliver from that file to deliver mail.
- The global procmail rules file looks to see if the user has a personal rules file and if so, reads the rules in that file and applies them.
Figure 9-2 illustrates the three features. In the figure, the MTA passes the mail message to the delivery agent, procmail. procmail filters the message through the global rules file. After processing the message, the global rules file checks whether the recipient has a personal rules file and, if he does, the message is filtered through that file. Finally, the message is dropped into the user's mailbox.
Figure 9-2. Procmail server-side filtering on a Cyrus server
The global procmail rules file
To put procmail to work, start by creating a global procmail rules file, /var/imap/procmail/procmail.global. The global rules file contains procmail filtering rules that apply to every message that is received by the MTA. The rules in the global file apply to all users. Any mailbox used in a recipe in the global file must already exist--if it does not exist, deliver will fail and the message will bounce.
deliver is invoked in the procmail rules as:
/usr/cyrus/bin/deliver -e -a username -m user.username
The -a parameter authorizes username (the mailbox owner) to deliver mail to the specified mailbox. Why is the -a parameter necessary, you might ask? When sendmail invokes deliver, it runs the deliver process as user cyrus. Because cyrus owns every mailbox in the Cyrus system, cyrus can deliver to any mailbox. In fact, cyrus is the only user other than root who can deliver to a mailbox. When deliver is run outside of sendmail, it runs as the user who invoked it. Because the user is not cyrus, she can't deliver into any mailbox. deliver has to be told to grant authorization to the user to perform the delivery.
An example global rules file is given in Example 9-9. The first rule in Example 9-9 is used during testing--it saves a backup copy of every incoming message in the user's backup mailbox (user.username.backup). In order to use this rule, the backup mailbox must exist for every user on the system. Once testing is complete, the backup rule can be commented out.
The variable CYRUSUSER refers to the username of the mail recipient. CYRUSUSER is set by the MTA before procmail is called, so the value of CYRUSUSER is available to the filtering script.
Example 9-9: A Global procmail Rules File
# File: procmail.global
# Make a backup copy of all incoming mail (comment the next entry
# out once you're finished testing procmail integration)
#:0 ic
#| $DELIVER -e -a $CYRUSUSER -m user.$CYRUSUSER.backup
# Execute CYRUSUSER's personal rules
[The user's procmail rules are included (via the INCLUDERC statement above)
and executed here. Rules after this point resume after the user's personal
rules have been executed.]
# Example recipes
# If the "To:" line doesn't exist, it's SPAM
* !^To:
# Get rid of SPAM from a specific email address
* ^To:.*firstname.lastname@example.com
# All the mail that falls through to this point
# will be delivered into the user's INBOX
| $DELIVER -e -a $CYRUSUSER -m user.$CYRUSUSER
Personal procmail rules file
Each user has a personal procmail rules file. It's stored under /var/imap/procmail/user/ in the file procmail.username. The personal rules file is the file each user edits when he wants to change his filtering rules. If the file exists, the
INCLUDERCstatement in the global procmail rules file runs the rules in the personal file. Example 9-10 shows a simple example of a personal procmail rules file.
Example 9-10: A Personal procmail Rules File
# File: procmail.username
# Filter mailing list messages into the appropriate mailbox
* (^Cc:|^CC:|^To:|^Sender:).*email@example.com
| $DELIVER -e -a $CYRUSUSER -m $MAILLISTS.imap_list
* (^Cc:|^CC:|^To:|^Sender:).*root@.*
| $DELIVER -e -a $CYRUSUSER -m $WORK
Remember that mail cannot be delivered to a mailbox unless the mailbox already exists.
For the rules in the previous example to work, the mailboxes user.username.Folders.Mailing_Lists.imap_list and user.username.Folders.Work must both exist. deliver will fail if it cannot find the mailbox it's told to deliver to.
As with mail forwarding, the personal procmail files are private to the Cyrus system. In order to edit the rules, the user needs some sort of indirect method, such as a CGI form, to create or modify his rules.
Setting up the MTA
Putting it all into action involves replacing deliver with procmail as the local delivery agent. As we saw in the example procmail rules files, deliver is invoked by procmail, instead of directly by the MTA.
Edit /etc/sendmail.cf and look for the section that defines the Cyrus mailer. It will look something like the lines below. If you've customized your sendmail configuration, it might look slightly different, but will begin with the identifier "Mcyrus".
Mcyrus, P=/usr/cyrus/bin/deliver, F=lsDFMnPqA5@, S=10, R=20/40, T=X-Unix,
A=deliver -e -m $h -- $u
Comment out that section and add the following lines below it:
Mcyrus, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMnPqA5@, S=10, R=20/40, T=X-Unix,
A=procmail -p /var/imap/procmail/procmail.global CYRUSUSER=$u
The -p argument tells procmail to preserve the existing environment (see the procmail (1) manual page for details on which environment variables are preserved). The last parameter, /var/imap/procmail/procmail.global, tells procmail to use /var/imap/procmail/procmail.global to determine its filtering behavior. The last parameter,
CYRUSUSER, sets the CYRUSUSER variable to username and passes the variable to procmail. CYRUSUSER is used in the procmail rules files, as we saw in Example 9-9 and Example 9-10. Once the sendmail configuration changes are in place, restart sendmail to make the changes active.
Server -Side Filtering with CMU Sieve
CMU Sieve is a server-side mail filtering language and is described in detail in Chapter 15, Server-Side Mail Filtering. Sieve is supported in Cyrus releases newer than 1.6.1b and does not require any special installation. Sieve runs out of deliver and requires sendmail 8.9 or higher.
Usenet Integration
Cyrus IMAP supports exporting Usenet news groups as mailboxes. If you run an INN server at your site, the Cyrus distribution provides utilities that allow you to integrate Usenet news into Cyrus. INN is beyond the scope of this book--we assume that, if you attempt to integrate news with Cyrus, you have a working knowledge of the INN server.
Programs for News Integration
Four programs, collectnews, rmnews, syncnews, and feedcyrus are provided with the Cyrus distribution for managing and integrating newsgroups with Cyrus. The programs are located in /usr/cyrus/bin. Each command, except feedcyrus, is further documented in section 8 of the online manual pages.
- collectnews
- collectnews adds a list of news articles to the Cyrus auxiliary databases. When collectnews comes across a newsgroup that does not have a corresponding IMAP mailbox, it creates one.
- rmnews
- rmnews removes a list of canceled, superseded, and expired news articles from the Cyrus auxiliary databases and unlinks the article files.
- syncnews
- syncnews compares the news active file with the full list of IMAP news mailboxes and removes mailboxes that are not found in the active file. If newsgroups in the active file are found that do not have a corresponding mailbox, then the mailbox is created.
- feedcyrus
- feedcyrus is a shell script that sends news to the Cyrus IMAP server. The script is created during the installation process if the build was configured to support news.
Configuring News
Integrating Usenet with Cyrus is simply done in two steps:
- Create a partition for the news spool directory.
- Set up for maintenance of the Cyrus server's auxiliary databases.
The partition name news is reserved specifically for Usenet news. You must name your news partition news. Even if you're not integrating news with Cyrus, the partition name news cannot be used for any other purpose.
Create the news partition
Select a directory to use as the news partition. It should not be the same directory as your INN news spool. In the following example, we selected /var/spool/imap/news to use as the news partition.
First, create the new partition directory and give ownership to the cyrus user:
# cd /var/spool/imap
# mkdir news
# chown cyrus imap-news
# chgrp mail imap-news
# chmod 750 imap-news
Edit your /etc/imapd.conf and set the
partition-newsoptions as shown in the lines below.
newsspoolis the pathname of your INN news spool directory.
newsprefixis optional--if you want the name of the news group to appear with a prefix (e.g., "news.comp.mail" instead of "comp.mail"), then set it to your preferred prefix, followed by a ".".
partition-news: /var/spool/imap/news
newsprefix: news.
newsspool: /var/spool/news/articles
Set up auxiliary databases
The basic setup for news involves granting write access to cyrus on the news spool and setting up cron entries to feed news to the Cyrus server and synchronize the newsgroups with Cyrus mailboxes.
The Cyrus utilities run as the cyrus user and will write to the news spool directory. To make the news spool directory writable by user cyrus, add the cyrus user to the news group and make the news spool directory group writable. In /etc/group, the line defining the news group should appear as follows:
Change permissions on the news spool to allow group write access:
# chmod -R g+w /var/spool/news
Update the newsfeeds file by adding the following line:
Set up cron jobs to maintain the auxiliary databases. The jobs should run as cyrus, so as the cyrus user, add the cron jobs to cyrus 's crontab. feedcyrus should be run every ten minutes. syncnews, collectnews, and rmnews should be run once a day. If necessary, replace /var/news/active with the pathname of your news active file. The crontab entries are as follows:
10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /usr/bin/feedcyrus
0 2 * * * /usr/cyrus/bin/syncnews /var/news/active > /dev/null 2>&1
10 * * * * /usr/cyrus/bin/collectnews
20 2 * * * /usr/cyrus/bin/rmnews </home/news/lib/expire-these.files
This section describes some problems commonly encountered on Cyrus systems, tells you how to diagnose them, and gives you a fix for one.
Testing the Server
From any account, telnet to the IMAP port on your Cyrus server and issue the IMAP NOOP command:
% telnet localhost imap
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK venus Cyrus IMAP4 v1.5.14 server ready
. noop
. OK Completed
If the server returns the message OK Completed, then the server is up and responding. If it returns anything other than OK Completed, then there is a problem--check the following:
- Check that /etc/services contains an entry for imap :
imap 143/tcp imap # IMAP Server
- Check that an entry for imapd exists in /etc/inetd.conf and that imapd runs as the cyrus user:
imap stream tcp nowait cyrus /usr/cyrus/bin/imapd imapd
- Check the permissions on the imapd executable:
$ ls -l /usr/cyrus/bin/imapd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 cyrus mail 303576 Apr 1 10:07 /usr/cyrus/bin/imapd*
- Check permissions on all directories on the path to imapd. The cyrus user must be able to traverse that path.
User cannot access mailboxes
If the server is up, then the problem is most likely a client configuration. Check to make sure she used the correct syntax to define her mailboxes.
If the syntax is correct, then the user may be trying to access a mailbox for which she has no permissions. In that case, check the ACL on the mailbox.
User stops receiving mail
If the user is able to log in to the server and read his mail, but complains that he has not been receiving mail, then:
- Make sure sendmail is running.
- Check to see if the user is over quota.
- Check to see if the user's quota is in a consistent state.
Users are unable to log in
First, determine whether the problem is authentication-related or if the server is not responding. Check the latest entries in /var/log/imapd.log. If there are more than a few
badloginentries, such as this one:
May 13 15:21:54 venus imapd[21934]: badlogin: europa [220.127.116.11] plaintext
announce Incorrect password
May 13 15:22:02 venus last message repeated 1 time
then the problem is related to authentication. If it does not appear to be an authentication problem, skip this section and read on.
If you use Unix shadow passwords to authenticate users:
- (Cyrus IMAP Version 1.5.24 and older) Check to see if the pwcheck daemon is running. If not, then start it (etc/init.d/pwcheck start ).
- Determine whether the user's password has a space character. Space characters are not supported in all IMAP clients.[8]
If you authenticate users using Kerberos:
- Check that the /etc/srvtab file exists.
- If the file exists, check that the permissions are 0400 (
-r--------) and that it is owned by user cyrus and group mail.
- Run klist -srvtab. If either rcmd or imap are not there, restart the server.
Adding SSL Support to Cyrus
If sending passwords in cleartext across the wire makes you nervous and you don't have the infrastructure to support Kerberos or CRAM, then you can hack SSL support into IMAP as a quick workaround. To take advantage of SSL, you would of course have to use an IMAP client that supports SSL. Currently, your choices are narrow: Netscape Messenger and Outlook Express/Outlook 98. The entire procedure for adding SSL support to IMAP is covered in Appendix B, Adding SSL Support to IMAP.
1. Subdirectories in a Unix filesystem can be forced to inherit the ownership of the parent directory by setting the appropriate "special" bits on the file.
2. CMU makes the info-cyrus mailing list archive publicly available as a Cyrus shared folder. It's available through a web interface at http://asg.web.cmu.edu/archive/mailbox.php3?mailbox=archive.info-cyrus.
3. This is assuming the partitions are being added, not moved. Downtime may, of course, be required to add new disk hardware to a system, but that downtime would be required regardless of the mail server software.
4. While simple, the configuration takes maximum advantage of the hardware by spreading I/O requests across the two controllers.
5. The errors depend on the client and can range from "permission denied" to "cannot save to mailbox."
6. On a Sun Enterprise 3500 with the mailboxes file on local disk, reconstruct took 7 hours to rebuild a mailboxes file containing 60,000 entries.
7. The From and From: header lines are not the same.
8. Not all IMAP clients quote the password like they should.
Back to: Managing IMAP
© 2001, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.


text:
Food adventure @ The Sharing House
For what has been months now, Meow Meow and I have frequently spoken of visiting the much-favourably-hyped Sharing House. With the return of Laiwah and a dinner planned for three, a booking at T.S.H (finally!) seemed to put in motion the wheels for a perfect dinner.
Laiwah: "Sharing the house."
The interior was interesting to say the least and seemed to possess contrasting themes: sleek but casual. Trendy and playful. The colourful lego feature stood out from afar (heck, I had even noticed it when we visited Akachochin, located next door, a few weeks ago) and had we been seated at the bar, I probably wouldn't have been able to control my urges to play with and rearrange the lego display.
Cranberry juice and pink grapefruit drink.
Complimentary sourdough bread, served with olive oil.
The olive oil was of great quality, and the olive flavour was rich and abundant.
And dinner was served.
Once one dish came out, the rest seemed to follow suit quite quickly. Either that, or Laiwah and I were just taking too long snapping up photos in between the dishes.
Chips - chickpea fries, served with house-made ketchup.
Served in a cone fashioned from newspaper that was fitted into a teeny tiny vase-like container with an accompanying even-tinier bottle of ketchup (phone included for size comparison), the presentation of the chickpea fries had me awwww'ing from first sight. The sweetness of the chickpea paired well with the salty seasoning on the chips and the sour sweetness of the tomato relish, with the latter really bringing out the chickpea flavour.
Surf and turf - rabbit ballotine, with prawns and baby potatoes.
Descriptions and/or explanations on how to eat a particular dish were lacking with some dishes and while the waiter who served this dish to us explained each component, they did not go over how to eat it. We ended up hazarding a guess and piled everything onto the piece of bread. The surf and turf dish was essentially prawn and pâté on toast. Whilst okay at first, I was not a fan of the gamy taste that continued to build after each bite.
Raw meat - classic steak tartare, served with chips.
Unexpectedly, the raw meat dish came out on top as the most enjoyed dish. My palate was quite surprised when the meat did not register as raw-tasting; instead, the soft and tender mince blended in with the soft and smooth interior of the flattened crisp potato. The meat was well-herbed and together with the sweet orange sauce, the flavours disguised any rawness.
With some leftover meat towards the end, I was more than happy to smear the meat onto my pieces of sourdough bread.
Tart - Witlof tarte tatin, with caramelised scallops.
The various shots capture Meow Meow's destruction-reconstruction work.
The tart sounded great on paper and was even better to look at (such pretty presentation) but was not so great when we actually started eating it. Given the number of elements present in the tart, it was surprising that there were only two flavours that we could detect: overwhelming sweetness from the pastry and extreme bitterness from the witlof. The scallops tasted quite bland save for the slight bitter witlof flavour that had rubbed off onto the scallop. The only positive aspect of the dish was the perfect flaky texture of the pastry, but this was lost as soon as the flavours registered with my taste buds.
Chook - breast of chicken, white asparagus & green olive couscous.
The chicken was very firm, tender and consistently cooked. The grains in the couscous seemed larger than normal and were somewhat like a smaller version of rice. The strong olive and subtle lemon flavour in the couscous was quite distinct and very enjoyable. Overall, the chicken itself did not leave much of an impression and took away from the couscous flavour, making it dull and bland.
Carrot - heirloom carrots, rosemary and feta.
The carrots were tender and spruced up by the herbaceous rosemary and salty feta. The sweet carrots served as a good side to pair with the chicken.
Feeling impressed with only the chickpea fries, the raw meat, and the cous cous alone, and underwhelmed by everything else, we were hoping that the turning point for our dinner would come with the desserts.
The Ice Cream Man - Ice creams served in mini cornettos. Coco nib, chocolate mint, limoncello, pistachio, vanilla bean & wild strawberry.
The use of the test tube rack in the presentation elicited much amusement from the scientist within. Additionally, the tiny sizes of the cones had me awww'ing yet again. The thin wafer cones were crisp and tasted like a crunchy crepe. The ice creams were very creamy and the flavours of the limoncello and wild strawberry were quite spot on. The small pieces of lemon rind in the limoncello ice cream provided lemon'ness to what would have otherwise tasted like vanilla ice cream. The wild strawberry reminded me of berry frozen yoghurt.
So in the end, I guess the small sizes turned out to be a negative aspect since I wanted more after finishing the 2-3 bites required to polish off each ice cream.
An ice cream toast.
Creme Brulee - bitter orange creme brulee, almond & orange blossom biscuits.
A visibly burnt caramel layer didn't exactly bode well for what was to come… With various degrees of burning ranging from burnt to overly-burnt, only some fragments could be salvaged. Perhaps that is what they were going for in regards to the 'bitter' element of the creme brulee, but the overly-burnt fragments were just too bitter to eat. The flavour of the orange custard layer was very fragrant and very enjoyable BUT (there's a but!) the texture was practically the opposite of what makes a good creme brulee; it was dense, not smooth and its overall texture reminded us of curdled milk. The equally fragrant and delicate almond & orange blossom biscuits were the one redeeming quality in this dish but since the creme brulee took the centre stage, the dish was a dud.
The lego was brought to us when the bill was presented in a lego box and allowed
us Meow Meow the opportunity to play with the lego pieces.
On a more important note, adding to our disappointment with dinner overall was an incorrect invoice: three additional items which we had not ordered was included in our bill. While it was quickly rectified after alerting one of the waiters to the mistake, the damage was already done and we left the venue feeling a little more unimpressed.
With a few hits and a few more misses, perhaps the best thing to come out of dinner (aside from the enjoyment of the raw meat dish and chickpea fries) is the fact that Meow Meow and I can finally stop going over and over the we-must-visit-TSH-soon conversation.
The Sharing House
35 Dukes Walk,
South Wharf, Victoria, 3006.
(03) 9245 9800

subset: commoncrawl


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