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Switched to Dovecot LDA and Sieve

by Julien on October 13th, 2007

I have worked almost all the day to update my mail server configuration to use Dovecot LDA and the Sieve mail filtering language instead of maildrop.

This was very easy thanks to Christoph’s ISP-style Email Server with Debian-Etch and Postfix 2.3 how-to.

I have adapted it to suit my needs, as I want the quotas to be set in the database on a per-user basis. Everything seems to run smoothly with dspam

Sieve is really powerful and simple. I just miss the “variables” features which would allow me to setup a unique rule for eg. all the Debian mailing-lists I am subscribed to. Anyway, my .dovecot.sieve file counts only 36 lines (including comments) compared to 150+ for my old .maildroprc file.

I also really appreciate the “imapflags” feature which allows me to mark the spam messages as read before dropping them to my junk folder:

if header :contains "X-DSPAM-Result" "Spam" {
  setflag "\\Seen";
  fileinto "Junk";
  stop;
}

I have also backported dovecot packages from sid to etch and applied the quota warning patch available from http://www.dovecot.org/patches/1.0/quota-warning.patch.

The packages for i386 will be available on my unofficial repository as soon as I will be able to understand why the ndiswrapper module silently crashes when I upload more than a few kB…

More information on how to set up quota warning are available from http://www.arschkrebs.de/postfix/dovecot_quota_warning.shtml.

The next step is to configure my virtual private server smtp to act as a relay for my whole network (to avoid my ISP smtp server), which means authentication etc.

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2 Comments
  1. Anonymous permalink

    I just set up a Dovecot server myself. I can highly recommend the antispam plugin at http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/Projects/dovecot-antispam , which will let you train DSPAM (or other spam filters) simply by moving messages into or out of your Junk folder. I use it with CRM114, and for use with that it supports an Unsure folder as well.

    Now if I can just figure out a convenient way to re-filter mail, so I don’t have to mentally apply my sieve filters to file a mail that ended up in my SPAM or UNSURE folders.

  2. Julien permalink

    I use another method for this, which I find very convenient for users: I have some spam@domain and ham@domain addresses, to which spam and ham can be forwarded.

    I have described this set up in my article on dspam: http://www.kirya.net/articles/setting-up-dspam-as-a-filter-for-postfix-on-debian-sarge/

    Maybe this can be of interest…
    Cheers,
    Julien

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