dovecot - Nov 2006 - Deliver bounces messages if can't write to logs

I am new to using Dovecot's LDA deliver.
One particular item which I think may be improved..
If one uses logs instead of syslog and if Dovecot/Deliver can't write to the
logs, mail is bounced.

In contrast if it can't connect to the authentication socket auth-master, it
defers.

Shouldn't mail be deferred if access to the log files fails due to rights?
Doesn defer makes more sense than to bounce in this case?

In all likelihood it was postfix that bounced/deferred, but I believe it has 
to do with what response postfix got from deliver.

On Tue, 2006-11-28 at 09:56 -0500, Francisco Reyes
wrote:
> I am new to using Dovecot's LDA deliver.
> One particular item which I think may be improved..
> If one uses logs instead of syslog and if Dovecot/Deliver can't write
to the
> logs, mail is bounced.
> 
> In contrast if it can't connect to the authentication socket
auth-master, it
> defers.
> 
> Shouldn't mail be deferred if access to the log files fails due to
rights?
> Doesn defer makes more sense than to bounce in this case?
> 
> In all likelihood it was postfix that bounced/deferred, but I believe it
has
> to do with what response postfix got from deliver.
Well, yes.. But the problem is that Dovecot in general uses its own exit
codes which Postfix doesn't understand. Errors that deliver code itself
catches are returned with standard exit codes, but fatal errors
elsewhere in Dovecot code are returned with the non-standard codes,
which Postfix apparently treats as permanent failures.

So there are two solutions for this:

1) Change all Dovecot's exit codes to use the standard exit codes.

2) Do some kind of exit code hooking so that Dovecot's exit codes are
converted to standard exit codes, but only when running deliver.

Both of these are pretty large changes, so they won't happen before
v1.0..
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