Fedora on dovecot 2.3 and replication feature drop in CE

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1

I am planning a mail system where the IMAP service should be fault tolerant.

I was thinking about a master-master setup of dovecot, with real-time sync using the replication subsystem, and a lb in front that always forwards traffic to one node until this goes down. No particular considerations for the storage, that could be the machine’s disks.

Reading a little online I understood that dovecot 2.3 CE is the last community version that will have the replicator plugin, and that it’s going to be removed in 2.4, with configurations such as the following, not working anymore:

service aggregator {
  fifo_listener replication-notify-fifo {
    user = vmail
  }
  unix_listener replication-notify {
    user = vmail
  }
}

Now dovecot 2.3 CE ships to fedora41/42 and RHEL9/10 and derivatives, but I see that fedora42 has RPMs for dovecot 2.4 so I felt like asking some clarifications and what the best alternative strategy is for this type of deployment.

  • Is the replicator plugin gone from Fedora’s RPMs for dovecot 2.4?
  • Are there other software alternatives that I should consider to accomplish real-time replication?
  • Are there other simple to maintain ways to implement fault tolerance in a dovecot setup that do not rely on the replicator plugin?