Martin Steigerwald said on Sat, 12 Jul 2025 10:11:35 +0200

>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 read their migration page(s). They're junk.

>
>I needed to lookup the relevant information in various places.

I bet you did :-) And I bet the various places contradicted each other.
This was what happened when I looked.

> 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.

I thought Postfix was SMTP like Sendmail. Is there an easy way I can
use Postfix as an IMAP server and nothing but an IMAP server? If so,
can it store emails in a standard Maildir format?

>
>My current impression for the 2.4 changes is: They went over the
>board.

Quite an understatement :-)


SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com