Dovecot upgrde problem in F43

Fedora 43 upgraded dovecot ( F43 Change Proposal: Dovecot 2.4 (self-contained) )

This meant that my old configuraton no longer works …

mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

I thought that the equivalent to this in 2.4 would be …

mail_driver = mbox
mail_path = ~/mail
mail_inbox_path = /var/mail/%{user}

but it seems that dovecot is now treating the mbox files as directories..

dovecot[2112]: imap(michael)<5145><x5QD+K1Air5/AAAB>: Error: maildir: stat(/var/mail/michael/tmp) failed: Not a directory

What is the configuration for dovecot 2.4 so that a plain old mbox file can be used?

Michael

It might be a bug in dovecot.conf

It seems that the lines in dovecot.conf

mail_home = /home/%{user}
mail_driver = maildir
mail_path = ~/mail

come AFTER

!include_try conf.d/*.conf

so any local configuration is overriden

Yeah - dovecot in F43 is hosed. You’ll be better off (the path I’m going down) not using the repo packages and all, setting up your config again and running it in something like docker - so your services don’t randomly break on upgrades.

Just upgrade to F43 today. What a royal PIA. I use dovecot on my server and use betterbird (enhanced thunderbird) on it and my chromebook. I use fetchmail to suck down mail from gmail and my ISP. I finally got dovecot so it will start. However, it does not see my mail folders nor my Inbox. Tried setting mail_driver in dovecot.con to both maildir and mbox. Restarted dovevot each time and restored my .thunderbird directory. When betterbird starts, it sees all the mail folders and my inbox but then the all disappear.

I may have just fixed it. Edited dovecot.conf. changed mail_driver and added mail_inbox_path

mail_home = /home/%{user}
mail_driver = mbox ← changed this from maildir
mail_path = ~/mail
mail_inbox_path = /var/mail/%{user} ← added this

found mail_inbox_path by reading through the output of doveconf -a and looking for any line with inbox in it. Found mail_inbox_path but it had a null value.

Lots of edits to files in /etc/dovecot/conf.d. Dovecot did not like the various plugin sections. I commented those out. Also commented out some metrics sections. Some sections were missing a name. Added “some_name” to those. Found out its just a name. Whatever you want to use. Also had to point it to my ssl cert and key files I get from LetsEncrypt. They changed the name of the variable. for example cert_file changed to ssl_server_cert_file. Same with key_file and dh_file.

Still seeing some errors on the journal log. Here is one example:

Error: Mailbox dovecot.index.log: open() failed with file /home/charlie/mail/.imap/dovecot
.index.log/dovecot.index.log: Not a directory

I’ll dig into those later.

How did this ever pass QA?

Look at my second post. You need to change the dovecot.conf file to move the include line lower so that your custom configuration is not clobbered.