magnusviri

OS X Server - Dovecot

[Update 2019-04-13: I no longer run a Mac OS X Server and Mac OS X Server is dead.]

Dovecot gets email handed to it by postfix (called "local delivery") and dovecot stores the email until an email client connects and retrieves email. Dovecot does IMAP or POP, not SMTP. Postfix does SMTP.

Here are my notes on managing dovecot on OS X Server (3.1.2) on Mavericks 10.9.4. This all assumes you know the basics of starting and configuring the Mail service using Server.app.

Note, this post is part of a series. Here are the other posts.

Learning Dovecot

Apple's mail server architecture documentation includes a good explanation how all of the services (postfix and dovecot) fit together. If you don't have a basic idea, it's good to just look this over.

Here are links to the official dovecot site and documentation.

Dovecot is not installed by default on OS X. It is included in the Server.app bundle, located at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/libexec/dovecot.

Dovecot Basics

Start Dovecot

dovecotd

Stop Dovecot

dovecotd stop

To re-read configuration files (after you make a change), enter:

dovecotd reload

Dovecot Settings

Display settings that are not default.

doveconf -n

The config file is located at /Library/Server/Mail/Config/dovecot/dovecot.conf.

To see how Mac OS X configures Dovecot differently than the default, run these commands.

doveconf -a > /tmp/doveconf_all
doveconf -d > /tmp/doveconf_default
diff /tmp/doveconf_all /tmp/doveconf_default

Dovecot Logging

To find the location of the logs use

doveadm log find

They are located at /Library/Logs/Mail/. Here's all of the log files I've got in there.

amavis.log
clamav.log
freshclam.log
junkmail.log
listserver.log
mail-debug.log
mail-err.log
mail-info.log
mail-info.log.0.bz2

If I run tail -f /Library/Logs/Mail/mail-info.log I'll see all of my user's connections. You'll also notice that the old log files are bzipped. You can search them using bzgrep and you can display them using bzcat.

This is how I'd find out when a user named "matt" last logged in (assuming my server IP was 10.0.0.1).

bzgrep -r "Login: user=<matt" mail-info.log.* | grep -v rip=10.0.0.1| tail -n1
grep -r "Login: user=<matt" mail-info.log | grep -v rip=10.0.0.1| tail -n1

I've use this regular expression to convert the log entries to tab delimited format so I can put it in a spreadsheet. My replacement syntax is for BBEdit.

Search: .*mail-info.log.*:(\w+ \w+ \w+:\w+:\w+) (\w+)-login: Info: Login: user=<(.+)>, method=(.+), rip=([:.\d]+), lip=([:.\d]+), mpid=(\d+),? ?(.*)

Replace: \1\t\2\t\3\t\4\t\5\t\6\t\7\t\8

This script will do an exhaustive search to find all of the last Dovecot and Postfix logins (including looking for aliases).

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $ignore_users = "^vpn|^diradmin";
my $logs_dir = "/Library/Logs/Mail";

my $dovecot_logins = {};
my @old_logs = `ls -tr $logs_dir/mail-info.log.*`;
foreach my $old_log ( @old_logs ) {
    parse_dovecot_logins( "bzgrep -r \"Login: user=<\" $old_log", $dovecot_logins );
}
parse_dovecot_logins( "grep -r \"Login: user=<\" $logs_dir/mail-info.log", $dovecot_logins );

my $postfix_logins = {};
parse_postfix_logins( "grep username= /var/log/mail.log", $postfix_logins );

my @user_names = @ARGV;
if ( $#user_names < 0 ) {
    @records = `dscl /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1 -list /Users`;
    foreach my $record ( @records ) {
        chomp $record;
        if ( $record !~ /$ignore_users/ ) {
            push ( @user_names, $record );
        }
    }
}

print "Server\tDate\tUser\tProtocol\tAuthType\tIP\tDNS\tEncryption\n";

foreach my $user ( @user_names ) {
    my $check_for_aliases = `dscl /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1 -read /Users/$user RecordName`;
    chomp $check_for_aliases;
    my @aliases = split(/ /, $check_for_aliases);
    shift @aliases;
    my @logins = ();
    my $dovecot_login = 0;
    my $postfix_login = 0;
    foreach my $alias ( @aliases ) {
        if ( $$dovecot_logins{$alias} ) {
            my $logins = $$dovecot_logins{$alias};
            my $last_login = pop @$logins;
            print "Dovecot\t$$last_login{date}\t$alias\t$$last_login{proto}\t$$last_login{authtype}\t$$last_login{RIP}\t\t$$last_login{encrypt}\n";
            $dovecot_login = 1;
        }
        if ( $$postfix_logins{$alias} ) {
            my $logins = $$postfix_logins{$alias};
            my $last_login = pop @$logins;
            print "Postfix\t$$last_login{date}\t$alias\tsmtp\t$$last_login{authtype}\t$$last_login{ip}\t$$last_login{dns}\t\n";
            $postfix_login = 1;
        }
    }
    if ( ! $dovecot_login ) {
        print "Dovecot\tNever\t$user\t\t\t\n";
    }
    if ( ! $postfix_login ) {
        print "Postfix\tNever\t$user\t\t\t\n";
    }

}

sub parse_dovecot_logins {
    my ( $command, $hash ) = @_;
    my @lines = `$command`;
    foreach my $line ( @lines ) {
        if ( $line =~ /.*mail-info.log.*:(\w+ +\w+ \w+:\w+:\w+) (\w+)-login: Info: Login: user=<(.+)>, method=(.+), rip=([:.\d]+), lip=([:.\d]+), mpid=(\d+),? ?(.*)/ ) {
            my $user = $3;
            my $login_hash =  {'date'=>$1,'proto'=>$2,'authtype'=>$4,'RIP'=>$5,'encrypt'=>$8,};
            if ( $$hash{$user} ) {
                push @{$$hash{$user}}, $login_hash;
            } else {
                $$hash{$user} = [$login_hash];
            }
        }
    }
}

sub parse_postfix_logins {
    my ( $command, $hash ) = @_;
    my @lines = `$command`;
    foreach my $line ( @lines ) {
        if ( $line =~ /^(\w+ +\w+ \w+:\w+:\w+) .* postfix\/smtpd\[\d+\]: (.*): client=(.*)\[([\.\d]+)\], sasl_method=(.*), sasl_username=(.*)/ ) {
            my $user = $6;
            my $login_hash =  {'date'=>$1,'dns'=>$3,'ip'=>$4,'authtype'=>$5,};
            if ( $$hash{$user} ) {
                push @{$$hash{$user}}, $login_hash;
            } else {
                $$hash{$user} = [$login_hash];
            }
        }
    }
}

Authentication methods

Apple's mail service documentation lists the available authentication mechanisms in the "Change authentication settings" section. This means this is how the password is dealt with, not the connection type. Here is the list that OS X Supports. These change

This page lists all of the methods that dovecot has

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Authentication/Mechanisms

Here are the descriptions on that webpage that OS X Server is configured to use.

Connection Encryption

The above authentication methods have nothing to do with the connection, or SSL/TLS, that is an entirely different matter. Apple's mail SSL documentation describes using SSL on OS X Server.

Dovecot has some SSL documentation as well, and it is especially useful in describing the difference between SSL, TLS, and STARTTLS.

I also have a section on my postfix page about SSL/TLS. It is especially useful because it talks about what you have to do to get rid of client certificate warnings.

Unencrypted at first (STARTTLS switches it to encrypted):

Encrypted the whole time:

doveadm

The doveadm tool is your gateway to all things dovecot. Dovecot stores email in it's own "home" directories, not system home directories. That's because dovecot email accounts might not be system accounts. You do not want to manually change anything in those directories because dovecot keeps indexes of everything in there and any changes that dovecot doesn't know about will ruin the indexes.

The doveadm tool allows you to make all the types of changes you'd normally want to, but it makes sure that all of the meta data it keeps stays good.

The first thing to know about the doveadm too is that you have to know how to specify what to work with, either users or mail. I'll discuss searching next, but I wanted to list what types of things doveadm can do.

To display information on a user named "matt".

doveadm user matt

Would print something like this.

field    value
uid    214
gid    6
home
mail    maildir:/Library/Server/Mail/Data/mail/8C088880-2DA0-4752-AE11-719BAF76FF87
quota    maildir:User quota:noenforcing
quota_rule    *:storage=0
mail_location    maildir:/Library/Server/Mail/Data/mail/8C088880-2DA0-4752-AE11-719BAF76FF87
sieve    /Library/Server/Mail/Data/rules/8C088880-2DA0-4752-AE11-719BAF76FF87/dovecot.sieve
sieve_dir    /Library/Server/Mail/Data/rules/8C088880-2DA0-4752-AE11-719BAF76FF87
sieve_storage    /Library/Server/Mail/Data/rules/8C088880-2DA0-4752-AE11-719BAF76FF87

/Library/Server/Mail/Data/mail/8C088880-2DA0-4752-AE11-719BAF76FF87 is dovecot's "home" directory for the user.

To specify a users, use -u.

doveadm quota get -u matt

doveadm mailbox

To list the mailboxes for a user, use this.

doveadm mailbox list -u matt

You should see something like this.

Deleted Items
Deleted Messages
Drafts
Junk E-mail
Notes
Sent Items
Sent Messages
INBOX

To create a mailbox use this.

doveadm mailbox create -u matt Junk

Searching with grep

Maybe you don't want to use doveadm to search, either you don't know how to use doveadm yet, because the index is corrupt, or because you want to search a Time Machine backup. Here's how you would do that.

This shows you the part of each file that matches.

grep -r --exclude "dovecot*index*" "text" /Library/Server/Mail/Data/mail/users/matt

This shows the list of files.

grep -rl --null --exclude "dovecot*index*" "text" /Library/Server/Mail/Data/mail/users/matt | xargs -0 ls -l

This shows the first 15 lines of each message.

grep -rl --null --exclude "dovecot*index*" "text" /Library/Server/Mail/Data/mail/users/matt | xargs -0 head -n15

This searches Time Machine.

grep -rl --null --exclude "dovecot*index*" "text" /Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb/Your_Server/*/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Server/Mail/Data/mail/users/matt

Do not modify the files you find with grep. If you change the files you will corrupt the Dovecot indexes.

doveadm search

Study the dovecot search documentation. And read the man page.

man doveadm-search-query

Here is a list of available search keys (based on IMAP version 4 revision, RFC 3501, section 6.4.4).

   ALL
   ANSWERED
   BCC pattern
   BEFORE date specification
   BODY pattern
   CC pattern
   DELETED
   DRAFT
   FLAGGED
   FROM pattern
   HEADER field pattern
   KEYWORD keyword
   LARGER size
   MAILBOX name
   MAILBOX-GUID guid
   NEW
   NOT search key
   OLD
   ON date specification
   search key OR search key
   RECENT Matches messages with the IMAP flag \Recent set.
   SEEN   Matches messages with the IMAP flag \Seen set.
   SENTBEFORE date specification
   SENTON date specification
   SENTSINCE date specification
   SINCE date specification
   SMALLER size
   SUBJECT pattern
   TEXT pattern
   TO pattern
   UID sequence
   UNANSWERED
   UNDELETED
   UNDRAFT
   UNFLAGGED
   UNKEYWORD keyword
   UNSEEN Matches messages, which do not have the IMAP flag \Seen set.

Additional dovecot search keys.

   SAVEDBEFORE date specification
   SAVEDON date specification
   SAVEDSINCE date specification

Dovecot has a method of indicating the date, either as day-month-year (e.g. "13-Apr-2007"), an interval (e.g. "1w", "1weeks", "7days"), as a unix timestamp (e.g. "1176418800"), or using YYYY-MM-DD (e.g. "2007-04-13").

Dovecot also has a size representation format that can specify octets, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, or terabytes (e.g. "1M" or "1024k").

Search examples

Count number of messages in matt's INBOX

doveadm search -u matt mailbox INBOX all | wc -l

List messages older then 30 days in user matt's Inbox

doveadm search -u matt mailbox INBOX savedbefore 30d

It will show a list of message ID's like this. The first number is the mailbox-guid, the second number is the message uid.

08fb930926bbb5532bb00000fdd69a3a 5136
08fb930926bbb5532bb00000fdd69a3a 5143
08fb930926bbb5532bb00000fdd69a3a 5145

To view one of those messages, specify it's uid. I'll discuss fetch more later.

doveadm fetch -u matt body uid 5143

List messages from joe@example.com

doveadm search -u matt from "joe@example.com"

List messages to joe@example.com

doveadm search -u matt to "joe@example.com"

List messages with the subject "This is a test"

doveadm search -u matt subject "This is a test"

List messages that matt has looked at

doveadm search -u matt -- SEEN

Find a message sent from joe@example.com on November 7th, 2014.

doveadm search -A from "joe@example.com" senton "2014-11-07"

It's pretty easy to search once you realize you have to specify the user, the key, and the value. You can include as many search keys as you want for an "and" search.

doveadm search -u matt mailbox INBOX subject "This is a test"

doveadm search -u matt mailbox INBOX savedbefore 1d new

Use "or" and "not" as well.

doveadm search -u matt mailbox INBOX or mailbox Trash

doveadm search -u matt mailbox INBOX not savedafter 4d

Searching for a message that has some text in the body

doveadm search -u matt mailbox INBOX BODY phish

Once you know how to search...

Once you know how to search, then you can work with those messages. The first task is to actually look at the messages (respect your users' privacy please).

A single message.

doveadm fetch -u matt "hdr body" uid 5143

All messages in the inbox

doveadm fetch -u matt hdr mailbox INBOX all | egrep "Date|From|Subject"

All seen messages

doveadm fetch -u matt -- hdr SEEN | egrep "Date"

I'll discuss the things you can display in a fetch next.

You can also delete (expunge) all messages older then 7 days in matt's Trash folder.

doveadm expunge -u matt mailbox Trash savedbefore 7d

Empty matt's INBOX

doveadm expunge -u matt mailbox INBOX all

What to fetch

You can fetch many fields in an email message. They must be in quotes.

This will fetch the body and date received of all messages in the inbox.

doveadm fetch -u matt "body date.received" mailbox INBOX

Here is a list of fields that can be fetch.

body   The body of a message.
date.received
date.saved
date.sent
flags  (A message's IMAP flags.)
guid   (A message's globally unique identifier.)
hdr    (The header of the message.)
imap.body
imap.bodystructure
imap.envelope
mailbox
mailbox-guid
pop3.uidl (A message's unique (POP3) identifier within a mailbox.)
seq    (A message's sequence number in a mailbox.)
size.physical
size.virtual
text   (The header and body.)
text.utf8
uid
user

/usr/local/bin/doveall

"-A" is suppose to specify all users, but for some reason it doesn't work on my server, and worse, when you try to control-c the command, it takes forever to exit. I tried to debug it but it was easier to just write a script that I call "doveall".

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

my $ignore_users = "^vpn|^diradmin";
my @commands = qw /altmove backup batch copy deduplicate expunge fetch force-resync import index move purge search sync/;

my $command = shift @ARGV;
if ( ! $command or $command eq "" ) {
    print "Missing command\n";
    usage();
}
if ( ! grep /^$command$/, @commands ) {
    print "Unknown command: $command\n";
    usage();
}

my $user_arg = shift @ARGV;
if ( ! $user_arg or ( $user_arg ne "-u" and $user_arg ne "-A" ) ) {
    print "-u or -A is required as the second argument, instead I got $user_arg.\n";
    usage();
}

my @user_names = ();
if ( $user_arg eq "-u" ) {
    my $flag = 1;
    while ( $flag ) {
        if ( $#ARGV < 0 ) {
            print "When using -u, a \"--\" is required.\n";
            usage();
        }
        my $arg = shift @ARGV;
        if ( $arg ne "--" ) {
            push @user_names, $arg;
        } else {
            $flag = 0;
        }
    }
} elsif ( $user_arg eq "-A" ) {
    @records = `dscl /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1 -list /Users`;
    foreach my $record ( @records ) {
        chomp $record;
        if ( $record !~ /$ignore_users/ ) {
            push ( @user_names, $record );
        }
    }
}

if ( $#user_names >= 0 ) {
    foreach my $user ( @user_names ) {
        print "doveadm $command -u $user @ARGV\n";
        system "doveadm", $command, "-u", $user, @ARGV;
    }
} else {
    print "No users specified.\n";
    usage();
}

sub usage {
    print "Usage: $0 <command> ( -u user [.. user] -- | -A ) <args>\n";
    print "\tCommands: @commands\n";
    print "\tSee `man doveadm` for a list of valid args\n";
    exit 1;
}

I use it like this to delete phishing emails.

doveadm search -u matt -- from phisher@example.com
doveall search -A from phisher@example.com
doveall fetch -A body from phisher@example.com
doveall expunge -A mailbox inbox from phisher@example.com

Or

doveall fetch -A hdr subject "Important Account Verification" | egrep "dove|Subject|Date"

It also allows me to specify a user list instead of -A, like this.

doveadm search -u matt joe jack -- from phisher@example.com

/usr/local/bin/dovephish

I'm getting so much phishing emails lately that it became burdensome to search for them all. So I wrote a script to help me search and expunge these emails quickly. It's interactive, so no need to explain how to use it. It only searches inboxes (since the mailbox-guid returned by doveadm search isn't usable with doveadm expunge, and I didn't think it was important enough to figure out how to map mailbox-guid's to mailbox names).

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
die( "Run me as root.\n"  ) if $> ne 0;

my @all_users = `dscl /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1 -list /Users`;
chomp( @all_users );
@all_users = grep !/^vpn_|^diradmin$|^_ldap_replicator$/, @all_users;

my @user_list = ();
my $search_group;
my $search_by;
my $search_query;

if ( 1 ) {
    $search_group = ask_question( 'Search (A)ll users or specify (U)sers? ', '^[AaUu]$' );
    if ( lc($search_group) eq 'u' ) {
        my %all_users_hash = map {$_ => 1} @all_users;
        my %defined_users = ();
        while ( 1 ) {
            my $result = ask_question( 'Specify a user (leave blank to finish): ', '' );
            if ( ! $result ) {
                if ( $#user_list >= 0 ) {
                    last;
                } else {
                    print "I need at least 1 user to search.\n";
                }
            } elsif ( $all_users_hash{$result} ) {
                if ( ! $defined_users{$result} ) {
                    push @user_list, $result;
                    $defined_users{$result} = 1;
                } else {
                    print "User already specified.\n";
                }
            } else {
                print "Unknown user: $result.\n";
            }
        }
    } else {
        @user_list = @all_users;
    }
    $search_by = ask_question( 'Search (F)rom or (S)ubject? ', '^[FfSs]$' );
    $search_query = ask_question( 'Search query? ', '.' );
} else {
    # STUB CODE FOR TESTING
    @user_list = @all_users;
    $search_group = 'a';
    $search_by = 'f';
    $search_query = 'bad@example.com';
}

my $command;
my $header = "from" if $search_by eq lc 'f';
$header = "subject" if $search_by eq lc 's';

foreach my $user ( @user_list ) {
    print "doveadm search -u $user $header $search_query\n";
    my @results = `doveadm search -u $user mailbox INBOX $header \"$search_query\"`;
    my $result_count = @results;
    print "$result_count results found.\n";

    for my $result ( @results ) {
        chomp $result;
        my ( $mb_guid, $uid ) = split / /, $result;
        print "doveadm fetch -u $user hdr mailbox INBOX uid $uid\n";
        my @full_header = `doveadm fetch -u $user hdr mailbox INBOX uid $uid`;
        my $small_header = join '', grep /^(Return-Path: |Date: |Subject: |From: |To: )/, @full_header;
        print "------------------\n";
        print $small_header;

        my $flag = 1;
        while ( $flag ) {
            my $next = ask_question( 'What now? (N)ext, View full (H)eader, (B)ody, or (Expunge)? ', '^(N|n|H|h|B|b|Expunge)$' );
            if ( $next eq 'Expunge' ) {
                print "doveadm expunge -u $user mailbox INBOX uid $uid\n";
                system "doveadm expunge -u $user mailbox INBOX uid $uid";
                $flag = 0;
            } elsif ( $next eq lc 'n' ) {
                $flag = 0;
                next;
            } elsif ( $next eq lc 'b' ) {
                print "doveadm fetch -u $user body mailbox INBOX uid $uid\n";
                system "doveadm fetch -u $user body mailbox INBOX uid $uid";
            } elsif ( $next eq lc 'h' ) {
                print "doveadm fetch -u $user hdr mailbox INBOX uid $uid\n";
                print @full_header;
            }
        }
    }
}

sub ask_question {
    my ( $message, $regex_exit ) = @_;
    while ( 1 ) {
        print "$message";
        my $input;
        chop( $input = <STDIN> );
        if ( defined $input and $input =~ /$regex_exit/ ) {
            return $input;
        }
    }
}

Sieve and Vacation replies

Sieve is this thing that lets you do server side filtering, including vacation replies. I now have a page dedicated to Sieve.

Debugging

Here's links to debugging documentation.

Published: 2014-10-15, last edited: 2020-05-11

Copyright © 2024 James Reynolds