To check if a maildrop mailfilter recipe is syntactically valid you can pass /dev/null to it:
$ cat /dev/null|/usr/lib/courier/bin/maildrop .mailfilter
If it is invalid maildrop shows an according error message. See also the maildrop mailing list.
Author: georg
STARTLS and courier mail server
I finally managed to use STARTTLS together with the Courier Mail Server. SSL connections (imapd-ssl and esmptd-ssl) already worked with the generated certificate. But although SSL worked trouble free and TLS options had nearly the same settings I could not get STARTTLS to work.
The overall reason was that the certificate file was owned 600 by root. With SSL this is not a big problem as the daemon which listens on port 465 and 993 does all the crypto handshake itself and runs under root. But with STARTTLS the connection is already forwarded to a non-privileged process before TLS starts its handshake (in fact it is initiated by the client over a cleartext connection).
So the solution was quite easy: Just give the certificate file the same owner the non-privileged courier processes run under – user “daemon” in case of CentOS 4/5.
Update: Yes, the solution appears to be quite obvious. But in fact courier doesn’t give any usefull information about the missing permissions. Instead it is handled as there would no no certificate file at all and SSL is disabled silently.
Autohotkey, ac’tivAid und Vimperator
Autohotkey ist eine Windows-Scripting-/Automatisierungs-Lösung. ac’tivAid ist ein darauf basierendes Projekt des Heise-Verlags, das den Umgang mit Autohotkey vereinfacht und einige grundlegende und nützliche fertige Skripte zur Verfügung stellt. vimperator ist ein Firefox-Plugin welches VIM-ähnliches Verhalten im Browser ermöglicht.
Leider wird in Verbindung mit vimperator die spezielle ac’tivAid-Variable %Selection% nicht befüllt.
CentOS 5.3 and yum-updatesd
Just found out that in CentOS 5.3 (and perhaps in upstream RHEL too) the automatic update yum-updatesd is not working anymore. There is a hint in the Release Notes.
The concerning bug report speaks of an minor issue. In my opinion its a major issue! Automatic updates do not work anymore and you don’t even get notified about that fact!
Update:There are some scripts out there which check for updates without the need for a special daemon. One of them is yumnotifier.
imapsync and flags
imapsync is a imap copy / sync tool based on message-id headers. It doesn’t use any state file and therefore cannot do a real two-way sync, but for just copying from one to another server its a usefull tool.
The documentation states
“All flags are preserved, unread will stay unread, read will stay read, deleted will stay deleted.”.
Unfourtunately this is not true. Imapsync always adds flags, it never removes them. The issue can also be found in last version 1.285.
The absence of a flag is quite a worthwhile information, and when doing mirroring it is essentially. But the fix is easy: Just replace the single occurence of “+FLAGS” with “FLAG”, so that imap request results in not adding but replacing the flags on the destination server.