[horde] (no subject)

[Andrew Morgan]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2003 ml at a019.hostcentral.com wrote:

> > > We are a small ISP trying to set up Horde with Cyrus 2 and SASL on
> > > FreeBSD-stable for our customers.
> >
> > We use Cyrus and Horde here successfully.  See comments below.
>
> Great. Thank you very much for answering us.
> Could you please tell us how large is your user base. [We would like to know how
> well does horde scale.]
> Do you host multiple domains in your configuration?

We host about 8 different domains.  One is the central Cyrus server that
everyone gets an account on.  The others are departmental IMAP servers
around campus.  On a average weekday, we get around 22000 logins for about
8000 unique users.  We have two webmail servers behind a load balancer,
for both redundancy and load balancing.  We run Horde, IMP, Turba, and
Kronolith right now.  I can give you more details if you'd like.

Horde scales fine as far as we can tell.  We are planning to add a third
webmail server behind the load balancer to give us a little more capacity,
although that is mainly for the future because the load is completely fine
right now.

> > > So far imapd works, a few mailboxes created and we are able to connect to
> > the
> > > horde interface and send/receive mail.
> > >
> > > Questions:
> > > 1. User creating a folder must specify "INBOX.[foldername]". Can this be
> > > changed?
> > > 2. Must all folders created by a user be under INBOX?
> >
> > With the default Cyrus configuration, all folders are subfolders of INBOX.
> > If you want to stick with this config, you should set "namespace =>
> > 'INBOX.'" in your IMP config/servers.php file.
> >
> > However, I'd recommend changing your Cyrus config by setting
> > "altnamespace: yes" in your Cyrus imapd.conf.  This changes the behavior
> > of Cyrus so that, from the IMAP user's point of view, folders are at the
> > same "level" as the INBOX.  If you previously had a folder "INBOX.foo",
> > the user would just see it as "foo", not as a subfolder of INBOX.  If you
> > do this, you should set "namespace => ''" in your IMP config/servers.php
> > file.
>
> We have done same thing and now we experience following:
> 1. With Outlook Express as a client we are able to create both top-level folders
> and also subfolders.
> 2. With HORDE when we give folder name as MYNEWFOLDER it creates a new top-level
> folder. However, if we try to create folder with name INBOX.myfolder we get
> following error 'The folder "INBOX.myfolder" was not created. This is what the
> server saidInvalid mailbox name'.
> Is it possible to have kinds of mail folders with horde just as with regular
> IMAP client?

The way altnamespace works, you can't create subfolders of INBOX itself.
On the server side, all folders are actually subfolders of INBOX, but
altnamespace maps them to the same level as INBOX.  If you were able to
make subfolders of INBOX with altnamespace in effect, where would the
server store them?  Of course, you can still make subfolders, just not
rooted at INBOX.  You could have:

INBOX
foo
foo.bar

but not:

INBOX.foo

If you are able to do this with Outlook Express, I can only assume that
Outlook Express is mapping the subfolder of INBOX to some other location.
Listing the mailboxes on the server side might show what is really
happening.

> > Please, be sure you understand the consequences of this change though.
> > Many Cyrus users believe altnamespace: yes makes the server behave more
> > like the users expect it to, but maybe you disagree.
>
> We also think that our users will be more comfortable with altnamespace.
>
> > > 3. Admin user cannot create top level [shared] folders. Moreover, when you
> > log
> > > in as cyrus admin user and go to the Folders page, Horde hangs. 'cyrus' is
> > in
> > > tghe admin array of horde/config/horde.php
> >
> > Don't ever log in as the admin user, except when you are using the cyradm
> > program.  The admin user does not normally have a mailbox (and shouldn't),
> > so when you login with Horde it can't select the "INBOX" for the admin
> > user.  Normally, all IMAP servers are required to handle the special name
> > "INBOX" and map it to the user's real mailbox (user.foo in Cyrus).  I'm
> > not sure what the behavior of IMP/c-client is if it can't do that.
> >
> > Shared folders should be created using the cyradm tool.
>
> This is probably very stupid, but I do not see a cyradm command that creates a
> new shared folder.

Shared folders aren't really different than regular folders.  In cyradm,
you create a users mailbox by prefixing it with "user." (for example, "cm
user.foo").  To create a shared folder, you just create "foo".  To make it
a shared folder, you need to grant users permission on the folder (for
example, "sam foo user1 lrswipcda").

If I remember correctly, once you have given a user permission to a shared
folder, they should see a folder named "Shared Folders" in their folder
listing.  The subfolder of that would be "foo", for example.  Let me know
if this doesn't make sense.

> > > 4. The imapd log is full of messages like this:
> > > Nov 10 18:05:19 a019 imapd[96798]: no user in db
> > > Nov 10 18:05:19 a019 imapd[96798]: login:
> > localhost.hostcentral.com[127.0.0.1]
> > > itz CRAM-MD5 User logged in.
> >
> > This is probably because the admin user does not have an "INBOX".
>
> What is the username for the user who is not in db?
> My /var/log/auth.log is full of "no user in db" and a few less "no secret in
> database" messages. However, I could not yet figure out what is the username
> for the missing user.

I think it should really be saying, "Can't find this user in
mailboxes.db", meaning that the user you authenticated as does not have a
mailbox.  That is assuming these log messages are caused by you logging in
as the admin user.  If they are caused by a regular user logging in, I'm
not sure.

> > > 5. It appears that each user only INBOX folder and no Drafts and/or Sent
> > that
> > > we
> > > expected to see. Is that normal? Could this be altered somehow?
> >
> > This is because you don't the namespace parameter set correctly.  Either
> > use "INBOX." (note trailing dot), or change to "altnamespace: yes" and use
> > "" (blank).
>
> I did this, but as I said now we have problems making subfolders.
>
> I am pasting my configurarion from imp/config/servers.php
>
> ---
> $servers['imap'] = array(
>     'name' => 'IMAP Server',
>     'server' => 'localhost',
>     'protocol' => 'imap/notls',
>     'port' => 143,
>     'folders' => '',
>     'namespace' => '',
>     'maildomain' => 'a019.hostcentral.com',
>     'smtphost' => 'localhost',
>     'realm' => '',
>     'preferred' => ''
> );
> ---

That is basically the same IMP config we use here.  See my comments above
about subfolders.

	Andy