Re: blog post on gnus, dovecot, and lucene

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

On 10/07/14 09:18 AM, Rainer M Krug wrote:
> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I mentioned a bit ago that I had shifted my gnus/dovecot setup, and
>> would blog about it. I finally did that:
>>
>> http://ericabrahamsen.net/tech/2014/oct/gnus-dovecot-lucene.html
>>
>> The gist of it is how to move to an always-running dovecot daemon, fed
>> by isync, and incorporating lucene searches into that.
>
> Nice - thanks.
>
> The idea of using virtual users under dovecot is intriguing - it makes
> all the name translations I am doing in offlineimap to keep my accounts
> in different folder structures unneccessary. Could you please elaborrate
> a little bit on your setup in this regard and where the emails are
> actually stored? I might be implementing th same approach because it
> sounds so simple!

I can't claim to understand the entire configuration procedure, as I was
just diving "deep enough" into dovecot, but the trick is this bit from
the dovecot.conf file:

passdb {
       driver = passwd-file
       args = /etc/dovecot/passwd
}

userdb {
       driver = static
       args = uid=eric gid=users home=/home/eric/.mail/%d/%n
       default_fields = mail=maildir:/home/eric/.mail/%d/%n/mail
}


Particularly the userdb section. I understand this to be saying: "each
virtual user should be run as uid "eric" and gid "users", and each user
will have their home directory under /home/eric/.mail, in a directory
that looks like domainname/username. Furthermore, the mail for each user
will be stored in maildir format, in a mail/ subdirectory in that user's
home directory." It's like making viritual home directories for each
virtual user.

So now my directory structure looks like:

~/.mail/ericabrahamsen.net/
  └── eric
      └── mail
          ├── cur
          ├── dovecot.index
          [ more dovecot stuff]
          ├── lucene-indexes
          ├── new
          ├── subscriptions
          └── tmp
~/.mail/paper-republic.org/
  ├── eric
  │  └── mail
  │      ├── cur
  │      ├── dovecot.index
  │       [ etc ]
  │      ├── lucene-indexes
  │      ├── new
  │      ├── subscriptions
  │      └── tmp
  └── info
      └── mail
          ├── cur
          ├── dovecot.index
          [ more dovecot stuff]
          ├── lucene-indexes
          ├── new
          ├── subscriptions
          └── tmp

So in cases where I have more than one user at the same domain name,
both users are nested under the domain name directory.

In hindsight the extra mail/ directory was probably unnecessary, I had
some idea that other files might go above that mail/ directory.

Hope that helps,
Eric