[tech] IMAP Broken for all new users (and for the last 4 years)

[Andrew Adamson]

Hi All,

I was doing some testing tonight and found that any user who chooses not 
to forward their email elsewhere is getting a pretty bad email experience 
in UCC. 

Every new user gets a copy of the skeleton home directory, which includes 
a procmailrc file that causes all that users mail to be pulled from 
/var/mail/<username> into ~<username>/mail/INBOX. Unfortunately, even 
though /var/mail/<username> is empty, dovecot (the imap server) is still 
looking at that file and treating it as the inbox, so when you log into 
webmail, or connect with a mail client, you see an empty inbox. In the 
case of connecting with outlook, the test email that is sent to test your 
account fails (since it can't see it arriving in the inbox), and you can 
never get the account to add on outlook. It's hence not surprising that 
people are recommending to new members that they forward their email.

I'm not able to fix this - is anyone else able to take a look?

Andrew Adamson
bob at ucc.asn.au

|"If you can't beat them, join them, and then beat them."                |
| ---Peter's Laws                                                        |