Dovecot-2.4

odhiambo

Is an update to Dovecot-2.4.x planned soon, now that Dovecot-2.3.x was EoLed?

Txs.

esackbauer

https://community.mailcow.email/d/4927-auth-debug-and-auth-verbose-passwords-does-not-seem-to-work-anymore/7

DerLinkman

We plan this by the end of 2025 as this will break all existing mailcows so we need some serious work and testing for this. No promises as we did not started this yet.

odhiambo

DerLinkman thank you for that update. I do agree with you on the need to wait a little longer for the 2.4 branch of Dovecot to mature. Looking at the issues coming up often in the Dovecot mailing list clearly shows there are issues yet to be fixed, especially for those coming from 2.3.21 - the final release in the 2.3.x branch.

DerLinkman

Yeah for me we can wait until End 2026 with that. Dovecot is a nasty b*tch sometimes especially due to this massive changes.

Let us play safe here.

ToM-MaS

Hello DerLinkman, I just wanted to ask how far along support for Dovecot 2.4 is. I saw that you are currently working on the “feat/dovecot-2.4” branch. I am planning to install my first mailcow and am wondering if it makes sense to wait for a clean installation with Dovecot 2.4.

DerLinkman

ToM-MaS I was just testing something locally. And i will not finish this approach by myself (mostlikely) as i’ll leave the mailcow project by May (oops, leaked… yeah an official post will follow soonish, sometime).

So, i cannot say when this implementation is done.

Ganzjahresgriller

Which specific features of version 2.4 do you need? I’m getting along very well with the current version.

jwaibel

i got a handcrafted docker based mailserver using dovecot 2.4.2, coming from an older version this been a pain in the … to get there. Feel free to talk to me about that

sebouley

It should be noted that dovecot <2.4 has critical bugs in the french stemming ( snowball )
Anyone enabling the french FTS stemmer in mailcow WILL have their fts crash , especially on large mailboxes.

DOV-5670: fts indexing assert-crashes when snowball filter causes a word to be dropped, e.g. "H." in French.
Fixes: Panic: file fts-filter.c: line 137 (fts_filter_filter): assertion failed: ((*token)[0] != '\0')

That’s not a small bug. The only workaround (if mailcow doesnt support dovecot 2.4) is to either not enable french and stem everything as english, or disable snowball.

esackbauer

sebouley
From what I can see this seems only relevant to the FTS modules in Dovecot Pro 3.0.0.
If you think that should be addressed by the developers, please open a github issue. I do not see having 2.4 oder 3.0 anytime soon, due to the reasons that were mentioned before.

sebouley

I’ve been affected by the bug myself, it’s a bug in dovecot (2.3 affected for sure : I have it myself in latest mailcow) and the quickfix was indeed to disable snowball.

It’ll be very difficult for mailcow dev’s to even reproduce this (I won’t send them my 10+GB mailbox 🙂 ) I just wanted to comment that this bug exists in mailcow - and I don’t understand why dovecot doesn’t basckport their fix to 2.3, they are a bit expecting everyone to basically erase and restart their whole dovecot config for the 2.4/3.0 migration … Wishful thinking ! If me opening a ticket can be helpful to the mailcow community I’d be glad to