Debian 13 and dovecot

Virtualmin
1
SYSTEM INFORMATION
OS type and version Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)
Webmin version 2.610
Virtualmin version 7.50.0 GPL
Webserver version Apache/2.4.65 (Debian)

I’ve installed debian 13 on Monday with the older stable version of webmin (2.520) and today I updated to version 2.610.

Everything seems to work ok except for saslauthd and dovecot.

I managed to fix saslauthd by applying the fix in the first post of this thread: Saslauthd fails to start on Debian 13 (Trixie) causing SMTP authentication failure: Wrong PID path in service file

But dovecot fails with this error:

doveconf: Fatal: Error in configuration file /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf line 89: default_mail_env: Unknown setting: default_mail_env

I changed

default_mail_env = maildir:~/Maildir

to

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

But I now see this error:

doveconf: Fatal: Error in configuration file /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf line 90: mail_location: Unknown setting: mail_location

Can I fix it without installing virtualmin again?

Dovecot 2.4 and Debian 13
4

I’ve spent some time poking around in dovecot configs and I’m confused by what’s going on with you configuration.

Where did you get default_mail_env from? Did you upgrade from an older version of Debian?

5

No, it’s a new installation.

I found it in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf at the end of file

...
# A config file can also tried to be included without giving an error if
# it's not found:
!include_try local.conf
default_mail_env = maildir:~/Maildir
disable_plaintext_auth = no
local_name xxxxx {
  ssl_server_cert_file = /etc/ssl/virtualmin/176398922446871/ssl.combined
  ssl_server_key_file = /etc/ssl/virtualmin/176398922446871/ssl.key
}

where xxxxx is my server’s hostname.

6

I don’t think that mail_location is meant to be in “dovecot.conf” at all. In the “conf.d” directory, file “10-mail.conf” has this block:

# Debian defaults
# Note that upstream considers mbox deprecated and strongly recommends
# against its use in production environments. See further information
# at
# https://doc.dovecot.org/2.4.1/core/config/mailbox/formats/mbox.html
mail_driver = mbox
mail_home = /home/%{user | username}
mail_path = %{home}/mail
mail_inbox_path = /var/mail/%{user}

I had to comment out those 4 lines and everything just worked.

There is no default_mail_env or mail_location in any of my Dovecot configs. Particularly in “dovecot.conf” it goes !include_try local.conf then immediately into local_name directives.

7

I removed default_mail_env and disable_plaintext_auth from /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
I disabled the 4 lines in 10-mail.conf

And now i see this:

 Fatal: Error in configuration file /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf: pop3_uidl_format setting doesn't contain any %{variables}.

I see this entry:

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/20-pop3.conf:51:pop3_uidl_format = %08Xu%08Xv

And a commented one in 10-mail.conf

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf:380:# pop3_uidl_format=%m. For backwards compatibility we use apop3d inspired
8

It’s coming from the current version of Virtualmin Config, it’s expected.

To be clear, this isn’t an issue in the Virtualmin RC 8.0.0 install script on Debian 13.

And, this is expected to happen with the current installer, but once Virtualmin 8 is released, it will work out of the box. If you really want a Debian 13 system right now, use the RC install script.

9

Can I apply a patch (e.g. change files) to fix it without removing everything and installing Virtualmin again?

If not, if I use the RC install script will I be in a RC branch for future updates? I mean would it be possible to switch to Virtualmin 8 once it is released?

10

Yes, it would be possible.

Can I apply a patch (e.g. change files) to fix it without removing everything and installing Virtualmin again?

Well, yeah, you could—just remove that default_mail_env deprecated directive and set manually:

mail_path   = ~/Maildir
mail_driver = maildir
mail_home       # remove
mail_inbox_path # remove