Why doesn't Cyrus put mail into boxes?

[Marco Colombo]

Mike Jones wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 15:37, Mike Jones wrote:
>  [...]
>  > However, no mail ends up in the mailboxes underneath the
>  > 
>  > /var/spool/cyrus/mail directory.
>  [...]
>  
>  Start with the logs. What does Postfix tell you? I think on Debian the
>  logging goes in /var/log/mail.log - does it look like Postfix has
>  successfully handed off to Cyrus?
> 
> Thanks for responding. This is what regularly appears in the mail.log file:
> 
> Aug 16 18:35:20 <hostname> master[15129]: about to exec /usr/sbin/ctl_cyrusdb
> Aug 16 18:35:20 <hostname> ctl_cyrusdb[15129]: checkpointing cyrus databases
> Aug 16 18:35:20 <hostname> ctl_cyrusdb[15129]: archiving database file: /var/lib/
> cyrus/annotations.db
> Aug 16 18:35:20 <hostname> ctl_cyrusdb[15129]: archiving log file: /var/lib/cyrus/
> db/log.0000000001
> Aug 16 18:35:20 <hostname> ctl_cyrusdb[15129]: archiving database file: /var/lib/
> cyrus/mailboxes.db
> Aug 16 18:35:20 <hostname> ctl_cyrusdb[15129]: archiving log file: /var/lib/cyrus/
> db/log.0000000001
> Aug 16 18:35:20 <hostname> ctl_cyrusdb[15129]: done checkpointing cyrus 
> databases
> Aug 16 18:37:28 <hostname> master[15130]: about to exec /usr/lib/cyrus/bin/pop3d
> Aug 16 18:38:46 <hostname> master[15133]: about to exec /usr/lib/cyrus/bin/pop3d
> Aug 16 18:40:04 <hostname> master[15139]: about to exec /usr/lib/cyrus/bin/pop3d
> Aug 16 18:40:46 <hostname> master[15141]: about to exec /usr/lib/cyrus/bin/pop3d
> Aug 16 18:40:47 <hostname> pop3[15141]: login: <remote client> cyrus plaintext 
> User logged in
> Aug 16 18:40:50 <hostname> pop3[15141]: Unable to locate maildrop for cyrus: 
> Mailbox does not exist
> Aug 16 18:42:36 <hostname> master[15142]: about to exec /usr/lib/cyrus/bin/pop3d
> Aug 16 18:45:36 <hostname> master[15144]: about to exec /usr/lib/cyrus/bin/imapd
> Aug 16 18:46:22 <hostname> master[15150]: about to exec /usr/lib/cyrus/bin/imapd
> Aug 16 18:46:27 <hostname> imap[15150]: login: <hostname> cyrus plaintext User 
> logged in
> 
> An exception to the regularity is the 18:40:50 intry, which was caused by a message 
> sent to cyrus@<mailserver>. There is no Cyrus mailbox, so that went all right. 
> Hence I assume this is the normal sequence of log entries you would expect?
> 
> Does this mean that the mailbox directory structure is simply a 'database' of 
> mailboxes only used for look-up purposes?

No. AFAIK, there's a separate db for mailboxes. But of course, it has to
agree with the directory structure for everything to work.

> What exactly do the authors mean by 'checkpointing'?

I don't know exaclty, but cyrus manages a set of databases, not only the
mailboxes one. You can choose their format at ./configure time.
One possible format is BerkeleyDB, and I think 'checkpoint' is normal
maintainance for BDB. Of course, database checkpointing is a general
concept, and it may apply to other formats as well. Please see:

http://www.sleepycat.com/docs/api_c/txn_checkpoint.html

> How do the cyrus user names correlate with email addresses? I wonder if this is 
> where the problem is - is mailbox 'peter' the same as peter@<mailhostname> or 
> peter@<domain> ? What controls that?

That's the job of the MTA (Postfix). It accepts a message, check if it's
local, if so does all the local processing (aliases to name one thing),
and ends up with one or more local mailboxes to deliver the message to.
The message along with the list of mailboxes is handed to cyrus.

> Assistance much appreciated. I would like to get this set-up to work :-).
> Thanks
> Mike

.TM.
-- 
       ____/  ____/   /
      /      /       /			Marco Colombo
     ___/  ___  /   /		      Technical Manager
    /          /   /			 ESI s.r.l.
  _____/ _____/  _/		       Colombo at ESI.it
---
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