[Discuss] Stalwart E-mail; Was: Re: SSH options

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 1/19/26 5:44 PM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> Rich Pieri wrote:
>> I may be migrating to Cyrus IMAP in the near future. I hear that
>> upgrading from Dovecot 2.3 to 2.4 can be a nightmare, and that
>> migrating to Courier IMAP can be easier than upgrading.
> The Dovecot company decided that 2.3 to 2.4 would be a gratuitously
> incompatible config file rewrite,

Not just gratuitous, but poorly done, not thought through.


> and that they would pull one feature
> in favor of their commercial-only product: automatic syncing of two or
> more Dovecot servers.

When you put it that way it sounds like a business decision, but in the 
2.3 Debian version syncing doesn't work. Or, barely works, and for me 
only after I applied a source code change the author suggested and 
another I guessed at.

That specific source file it is a ducking mess, with the kinds of 
inconsistencies that C is perfectly willing to compile and ARE going to 
be runtime bugs. I think they dumped syncing because they threw up their 
hands in frustration, concluding it needed to be rewritten from scratch.

I think they are keeping it for paid customers on the theory that they 
can always handhold it into working mostly, might as well get money for 
that. Those customers will go away if syncing goes away.


It looks to me that over time, with every change to the Dovecot sources, 
in addition to the intended purpose, they have also sprinkled in a 
little extra entropy. The worse kind of complexity.


If the advertised function of the program is so iffy (I get two 
different kinds of weird sync errors, some on some days, others on other 
days, and no errors on many days), I figure the security holes must be 
horrific. For a program I have sitting on the open internet.

I think Dovecot is on its last legs, at some point they will throw in 
the towel. Version 2.3 is my last.


-kb