dovecot - Feb 2008 - links causing dovecot endless search through user's homedirs

Hello,
   My user's imap folder locations are a mess.  Some have them in
/home/username/mail but a lot of them just have them in /home/username.

So I need to have dovecot's base imapdir pointed directly at the user's
homedirs.

My problem now is that a lot of users have many links in their homedirs.
Some even have circular links, such as:

/home/username/foo/foo1/foo2/foo3/foo4 -> /home/username/foo/foo1

All these links are causing some dovecot imap process to endlessly search.

An example of a strace of a running imap processes shows:

stat64("/home/xxx//jlab/jlab/dev/tail/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/resul
ts/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDT
RY/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/results/fa ...

and so on.

Since I can't get a hold of my users and make them all put their imap
folders in /home/username/mail and configure dovecot to just search
there...

Is there a way to tell dovecot to ignore links ?

Thanks,
Paul

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

dovecot1.jlab.org> dovecot --version
1.0.rc15


dovecot1.jlab.org> sudo dovecot -n
# /etc/dovecot.conf
protocols: imaps
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable: /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_max_processes_count: 512
login_max_connections: 1024
first_valid_uid: 100
mail_location: mbox:%h:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
mmap_disable: yes
mbox_read_locks: dotlock
mbox_write_locks: dotlock
auth default:
   passdb:
     driver: pam
   userdb:
     driver: passwd

On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 12:19 -0500, Paul Letta wrote:
> Since I can't get a hold of my users and make them all put their imap
> folders in /home/username/mail and configure dovecot to just search
> there...
Couldn't you do this automatically? Move all files that look like mboxes
to mail/ directory.
> Is there a way to tell dovecot to ignore links ?
Attached a patch, but I don't really like the idea of adding a setting
for it. It could give a false sense of security since it only changes
mailbox listing, the symlinks are still followed if the mailboxes are
selected.
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Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 12:19 -0500, Paul Letta wrote:
>
>   
>> Since I can't get a hold of my users and make them all put their
imap
>> folders in /home/username/mail and configure dovecot to just search
>> there...
>>     
>
> Couldn't you do this automatically? Move all files that look like
mboxes
> to mail/ directory.
>
>   
If somebody has a nice tool moving everything that looks like a mbox to 
the mail directory, I'd sure love it have it.

I've been toying with this for some time.

John

-- 
John Gray                           gray at agora-net.com
AgoraNet, Inc.                      (302) 224-2475
314 E. Main Street, Suite 1         (302) 224-2552 (fax)
Newark, De 19711                    http://www.agora-net.com