dovecot - Oct 2007 - Dovceot user pop3 last connect info?

Dovecot experts,
   I am a newbie to Dovecot.  I am in the process of replacing 
qpopper with dovecot to support pop 3 clients.  I have installed the 
latest version of Dovecot on Fedora Core 6.  Everything seems to be 
working fine using ldap, etc.
   However, with qpopper, I used to have .pop.username files which 
would give me a time stamp of the last time a user established a pop3 
connection.  I know that Dovecot has logs of connection in the 
/var/log/maillog files, but these files rotate out over a relatively 
short period of time.  Is there a method by which one can keep track 
of the last time a pop3 connection was established for each user when 
using Dovecot?



Tim Tyler
Network Engineer - Beloit College
tyler at beloit.edu

On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Tim Tyler wrote:
>   Dovecot experts,
>  I am a newbie to Dovecot.  I am in the process of replacing qpopper with 
> dovecot to support pop 3 clients.  I have installed the latest version of 
> Dovecot on Fedora Core 6.  Everything seems to be working fine using ldap, 
> etc.
>  However, with qpopper, I used to have .pop.username files which would give
> me a time stamp of the last time a user established a pop3 connection.  I 
> know that Dovecot has logs of connection in the /var/log/maillog files, but
> these files rotate out over a relatively short period of time.  Is there a 
> method by which one can keep track of the last time a pop3 connection was 
> established for each user when using Dovecot?
You can do this (and many other things) through Post-Login Scripting:
http://wiki.dovecot.org/PostLoginScripting

See in particular ?Last-login tracking?:
http://wiki.dovecot.org/PostLoginScripting#line-20


A simple example for your specific request:

In /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf:

protocol pop3 {
# [etc.]
mail_executable = /full/path/to/custom-pop3.sh


Then, in custom-pop3.sh: (which needs to be chmod +x)

#!/bin/sh
touch /var/mail/.pop.$USER
exec /usr/libexec/dovecot/pop3

Best,
Ben