Hi Steve.

Steve Litt - 12.07.25, 09:02:04 CEST:
> Pin your current Dovecot 2.3.x now, and don't allow an upgrade to
> 2.4.x. Dovecot's documentation is disorganized, unhelpful,
> contradictory, and often just plain wrong. Right now the Dovecot
> project is going through problems caused by their crippling free
> software Dovecot in order to sell a commercial Dovecot with earlier
> Dovecot's features. They call 2.4.x Dovecot Community Edition. I'm
> calling it Dovecot Breaking Edition.

Haha. I had this with my mail server container upgrade with Alpine 3.22.

And indeed, they broke basically almost everything. The one time I did not
tell Incus on the Devuan host system to snapshot the container before
doing the upgrade! That thought me a lesson: Always snapshot on major
upgrades! At least for more complex or critical containers.

So I basically had to either restore the container from backup or fix up
the configuration. I did the latter, but if I had known the amount of work
beforehand, I might have skipped it at that time.

I went through it and fixed my configuration for 2.4. In case you have any
specific questions to specific configuration blocks I can tell you what I
did to make it work. But although I do have a git history of my changes I
do not have the time to document it all at the moment. So please ask what
you need *after* you fixed all you can when reading into their
configuration migration page yourself.

I needed to lookup the relevant information in various places. The
configuration file syntax changes are very broad and fundamental and
unfortunately not all documented *with* examples of old versus new on
*one* page. So I dug quite a bit through their reference documentation.

At least they introduced a configuration file format version now, so that
such a surprise should not happen again *unless* they decide to drop
support for an older configuration file format version at some time.

Compared to Postfix Dovecot also before sometimes has been an annoyance
regarding configuration updates. Postfix upgrades went a huge lot more
smoothly so far. Other than that Dovecot was okay for me so far.

My current impression for the 2.4 changes is: They went over the board. By
far. The new syntax is a lot more complex. Maybe one thing that makes
sense is that you to not need input redirection sign for mentioned
filenames in the configuration at various places anymore. But also may not
use it anymore.

Best,
--
Martin