SOGO_EXPIRE_SESSION from mailcow.conf

honza-kratochvil

I’m using mailcow dockerized and set SOGO_EXPIRE_SESSION to 14400 in my mailcow.conf
It worked fine until I made update in Apr-25
Now my session expires within hours.
I know the login process changed, did I miss something?

jman

I am also experiencing this.

I didn’t notice the SOGO_EXPIRE_SESSION env variable for a long time but after setting it I don’t see visible changes.

suicidaleggroll

I’ve noticed the same. More than a month or so ago I could log into SOGo in the morning and it would be active all day, only logging me back out overnight. Recently it logs me back out very quickly, within a couple of hours. SOGO_EXPIRE_SESSION in mailcow.conf is still set to the default value of 480, so it appears that variable is no longer being used with the new auth system. How do we set SOGo session expiration now?

Edit: I’ve seen some other posts talking about copying data/web/inc/vars.inc.php to data/web/inc/vars.local.inc.php, and then edit SESSION_LIFETIME in there to extend the time. The default there is 10800 seconds (3 hours) which could line up with the behavior I’m seeing now. I’ve tried extending that to 28800 (8 hours) to see what happens.
https://community.mailcow.email/d/2818-can-the-logged-in-duration-in-the-web-ui-be-pro-longed
https://docs.mailcow.email/manual-guides/mailcow-UI/u_e-mailcow_ui-config/

jman

I suspect it has to do with the sogo tool to expire sessions.

Mailcow has a cronjob for that, which seems to respect SOGO_EXPIRE_SESSION
mailcow/mailcow-dockerizedblob/1994b9895bc92cfc83caf0f25123efbb763f8635/docker-compose.yml#L239

I’m running a probably stupid test: I set manually the expire for sessions in the running Docker container to see if something changes:

$ docker exec -it mailcowdockerized-sogo-mailcow-1 bash
# usr/sbin/sogo-tool expire-sessions 14400
...
2025-05-30 11:41:24.308 sogo-tool[118464:118464] Remove all sessions older than 14400 min

(I’ll report if I see anything different)

suicidaleggroll

My earlier post describing the change to SESSION_LIFETIME in data/web/inc/vars.local.inc.php appears to have worked. I logged into SOGo this morning and then left that tab alone for ₇ hours, and it didn’t kick me out like it was doing previously.

honza-kratochvil

Yes, I can also confirm, change to SESSION_LIFETIME in data/web/inc/vars.local.inc.php or data/web/inc/vars.inc.php works.
Will this survive container update?

jman

honza-kratochvil yes

https://docs.mailcow.email/manual-guides/mailcow-UI/u_e-mailcow_ui-config/