Hello everyone, I have the following problem, maybe you have a solution. We have two mail servers that replicate via Dovecot. Now we have customers who collect via Pop3 and Thunderbird and have set the option that the mails remain on the server for a few days. The check mark for delete mails when moved from the inbox is out. When a mail is read, it is moved to the cur directory on one server, but is not replicated on the other server. There the mail remains in the new folder. The same applies to mails that are deleted. These remain on the one server. This sometimes leads to the phenomenon that the mail in question suddenly reappears in the inbox after a certain period of time. The replication itself works without errors and everything is also ok when using IMAP. I have already searched for the phenomenon and have found the workaround that the mails are flagged for deletion and then deleted with a cronjob. Is there a better solution?
That can only happen when the client is connecting to different servers each time before the state changes where synced up. The official documentation even says the following: I guess you should bind the client to a fixed backend or use imap in this case. Anyways be aware that replicator/dsync is a thing of the past and will be gone in dovecot 3.
Well they will split into a paid and free version. They remove alot of things from the free version which include: Dovecot Director Replication Single Instance Storage: fs-sis In version 2.3 they features are still included and the version is supported for some time. In version "2.4" the features are remove from code, however the code is still usable in that version too maybe as an external plugin for dovecot. We should be fine until 2029 IIRC. We will see what the community comes up with as soon as 2.4 is released. For very large scale the Dovecot Cluster(Pro) seems like a great option, but for smaller companies and hosters or even privat servers we need to come up with a solution. There are a few possible options like a plugin or even shared storage with some custom lua as a director service, but for now we can only wait and hope that someone is willing to put in the work
The reason I asked was because some time ago I've been testing with dual Ubuntu 22.04 and Dovecot sync but I ran into problem I've never been able to solve. Mailboxes on both servers became out of sync. Most likely because of the same reason Blubmann1337 ran into troubles. Running " doveadm replicator status '*' " returns all mailboxes (on both servers) with failed " y ". None of the (re)sync commands I've tried where able to fix it. Very soon I need to start over with a new Ubuntu 24.04 install and would still like have a dual set-up with replication. But after reading this I'm very hesitant to go about it in mostly the same way as I did before (and failed).
Don't know your setup but i think some kind of cluster storage + director should be a good Idea. Telekom still maintains the dovecot ceph storage plugin. I would research in that direction
