Anarcat's
"procmail considered harmful" post
convinced me to get my act together and finally migrate my venerable procmail based setup to sieve.
My setup was nontrivial, so I migrated with an intermediate step in which sieve
scripts would by default pipe everything to procmail, which allowed me to
slowly move rules from
procmailrc to sieve until nothing remained in
procmailrc.
Here's what I did.
Literature review
https://brokkr.net/2019/10/31/lets-do-dovecot-slowly-and-properly-part-3-lmtp/
has a guide quite aligned with current Debian, and could be a starting point to
get an idea of the work to do.
https://wiki.dovecot.org/HowTo/PostfixDovecotLMTP is way more terse, but
more aligned with my intentions. Reading the former helped me in understanding
the latter.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5228 has the full Sieve syntax.
https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/sieve/pigeonhole_sieve_interpreter/
has the list of Sieve features supported by Dovecot.
https://doc.dovecot.org/settings/pigeonhole/ has the reference on Dovecot's
sieve implementation.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dovecot/pigeonhole/master/doc/rfc/spec-bosch-sieve-extprograms.txt
is the
hard to find full reference for the functions introduced by the
extprograms plugin.
Debugging tools:
- doveconf to dump dovecot's
configuration to see if what it understands matches what I mean
- sieve-test
parses sieve scripts:
sieve-test file.sieve /dev/null is a quick and dirty
syntax check
Backup of all mails processed
One thing I did with procmail was to generate a monthly mailbox with all
incoming email, with something like this:
BACKUP="/srv/backupts/test- date +%Y-%m-d .mbox"
:0c
$BACKUP
I did not find an obvious way in sieve to create montly mailboxes, so I
redesigned that system using Postfix's
always_bcc
feature, piping everything to an archive user.
I'll then recreate the monthly archiving using a
chewmail script that I can simply run
via cron.
Configure dovecot
apt install dovecot-sieve dovecot-lmtpd
I added this to the local dovecot configuration:
service lmtp
unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/dovecot-lmtp
user = postfix
group = postfix
mode = 0666
protocol lmtp
mail_plugins = $mail_plugins sieve
plugin
sieve = file:~/.sieve;active=~/.dovecot.sieve
This makes Dovecot ready to receive mail from Postfix via a lmtp unix socket
created in Postfix's private chroot.
It also activates the sieve plugin, and uses
~/.sieve as a sieve script.
The script can be a file or a directory; if it is a directory,
~/.dovecot.sieve will be a symlink pointing to the
.sieve file to run.
This is a feature I'm not yet using, but if one day I want to try
enabling UIs
to edit sieve scripts,
that part is ready.
Delegate to procmail
To make sieve scripts that delegate to procmail, I enabled the
sieve_extprograms plugin:
plugin
sieve = file:~/.sieve;active=~/.dovecot.sieve
+ sieve_plugins = sieve_extprograms
+ sieve_extensions +vnd.dovecot.pipe
+ sieve_pipe_bin_dir = /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-pipe
+ sieve_trace_dir = ~/.sieve-trace
+ sieve_trace_level = matching
+ sieve_trace_debug = yes
and then created a script for it:
mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-pipe/
(echo "#!/bin/sh'; echo "exec /usr/bin/procmail") > /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-pipe/procmail
chmod 0755 /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-pipe/procmail
And I can have a sieve script that delegates processing to procmail:
require "vnd.dovecot.pipe";
pipe "procmail";
Activate the postfix side
These changes switched local delivery over to Dovecot:
--- a/roles/mailserver/templates/dovecot.conf
+++ b/roles/mailserver/templates/dovecot.conf
@@ -25,6 +25,8 @@
+auth_username_format = %Ln
+
diff --git a/roles/mailserver/templates/main.cf b/roles/mailserver/templates/main.cf
index d2c515a..d35537c 100644
--- a/roles/mailserver/templates/main.cf
+++ b/roles/mailserver/templates/main.cf
@@ -64,8 +64,7 @@ virtual_alias_domains =
-mailbox_command = procmail -a "$EXTENSION"
-mailbox_size_limit = 0
+mailbox_transport = lmtp:unix:private/dovecot-lmtp
Without
auth_username_format = %Ln dovecot won't be able to understand
usernames sent by postfix in my specific setup.
Moving rules over to sieve
This is mostly straightforward, with the luxury of being able to do it a bit at
a time.
The last tricky bit was how to call
spamc from sieve, as in some situations I
reduce system load by running the spamfilter only on a prefiltered selection of
incoming emails.
For this I enabled the
filter directive in sieve:
plugin
sieve = file:~/.sieve;active=~/.dovecot.sieve
sieve_plugins = sieve_extprograms
- sieve_extensions +vnd.dovecot.pipe
+ sieve_extensions +vnd.dovecot.pipe +vnd.dovecot.filter
sieve_pipe_bin_dir = /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-pipe
+ sieve_filter_bin_dir = /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-filter
sieve_trace_dir = ~/.sieve-trace
sieve_trace_level = matching
sieve_trace_debug = yes
Then I created a filter script:
mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-filter/"
(echo "#!/bin/sh'; echo "exec /usr/bin/spamc") > /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-filter/spamc
chmod 0755 /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-filter/spamc
And now what was previously:
:0 fw
/usr/bin/spamc
:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
.spam/
Can become:
require "vnd.dovecot.filter";
require "fileinto";
filter "spamc";
if header :contains "x-spam-level" "**************"
discard;
elsif header :matches "X-Spam-Status" "Yes,*"
fileinto "spam";
Updates
Ansgar mentioned that it's possible to replicate the monthly mailbox using the
variables and
date
extensions, with a hacky trick from the extensions' RFC:
require "date"
require "variables"
if currentdate :matches "month" "*" set "month" "$ 1 ";
if currentdate :matches "year" "*" set "year" "$ 1 ";
fileinto :create "$ month -$ year ";
Sometimes I have remote meetings with Google Meet. Unlike the other
video-conferencing services that I use (Bluejeans, Zoom), my video
was stretched out of proportion under Google Meet with Firefox.
I haven't found out why this was happening, but I did figure out a
work-around.
Thanks to Daniel Silverstone, Rob Kendrick, Gregor Herrmann and Ben Allen for
pointing me in the right direction!
Hardware
The lovely Sony RX-100 mk3 that I bought in 2015 has
spent most of its life languishing unused. During the Pandemic, once
I was working from home all the time, I decided to press-gang it into
service as a better-quality webcam. Newer models of this camera
the mark 4 onwards have support for a USB mode called "PC Remote",
which effectively makes them into webcams. Unfortunately my mark 3
does not support this, but it does have HDMI out, so I picked up a
cheap "HDMI to USB Video Capture Card" from eBay.
Video modes
Sony RX100-III, relegated to a webcam
Before: wrong aspect ratio
After: corrected aspect ratio
I bought myself a new keyboard last November, a 
In February I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative and carried over 8 hours from January. I worked 16
hours, and will carry over the remaining time to March.
I spent most of my time triaging security issues for Linux, working
out which of them were fixed upstream and which actually applied to
the versions provided in Debian 9 "stretch". I also rebased the
Linux 4.9 (linux) package on the latest stable update, but did not
make an upload this month.
As of this morning, 
I recently learned about the