Ron via Talk said on Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:16:34 -0800
Steve Litt via Talk wrote on 2026-01-12 13:23:
I want to hear about this too. My entire email usage depends on Dovecot, and Dovecot 2.4.x has jumped the shark in order to offer a proprietary product not in competition with their free software
What changes are you referring to?
I've just looked over this page:
https://doc.dovecot.org/main/installation/upgrade/2.3-to-2.4.html#removed-fe...
and I'm seeing some things I like, some I don't know about, some that may bite me, but nothing about removing features that I use.
They're big-iron features for big networks, not things an individual would use.
Global ACLs are a PITA, and they're changing how to implement ACLs, so the ability isn't gone, just different.
Yes. I suspect that other than the removed features, which don't apply to my usage, Dovecot can still do everything it used to. Problem is, getting the config right is an undertaking when doing it on a live system where you don't have the option of experimentation. And it was much worse early on when Void Linux switched to 2.4.x many months ago. One day my email just stopped working. It took some time to narrow it down to Dovecot. I figured "well, how hard can it be to make a few changes in the config file?" Well, it was murder, because most things are different: Even keywords. Since then, I've seen distro after distro upgrade to 2.4.x, with many of their users going through the same thing I did. And it doesn't help that because Dovecot was so stable and robust in the past, once I got a working config in 2012 I pretty much left it alone, so I know little about Dovecot, because until now, it just worked(tm). It also didn't help that they made these massive changes with a minor version (right of the decimal point). They should have called it 3.0 and should have publicized the hell out of what was coming down the pike so people were ready when their distro upgraded. I've still got my Dovecot pinned to 2.3.21.1 because I haven't busted loose enough time to run an experimental 2.4.x in a Qemu VM guest, and I'm not going to screw up my live email system again. And of course I have a bad taste in my mouth from the whole thing, and wonder what massive changes the Dovecot folks will make next, so I'm looking for alternatives. SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com