Bug#815956: Lack of IMAPACCESSFILE in /etc/courier/imapd

[J Mo]

Recently I decided to upgrade courier (mta and imap) on one of my mail servers. It was a disaster. The quality of these packages is abysmal and dangerous. This is one of the many serious, grave, and critical bugs I ran into during that process.



Our problem is in postinst, line 30, "makeimapaccess".

makeimapaccess is just a shell script.
    /usr/lib/courier/makeimapaccess

This is all new to me.

makeimapaccess is looking for configuration directive "IMAPACCESSFILE" in /etc/courier/imapd (and imapd-ssl). But this does not exist.

This looks important:
https://sourceforge.net/p/courier/mailman/message/34734150/

If we google for IMAPACCESSFILE we get almost nothing. Search the courier-mta.org documentation website for "IMAPACCESSFILE" and there is nothing at all.

I assume our local man pages have nothing on this.

I checked the changelogs... almost nothing: /usr/share/doc/courier-imap/changelog.gz

    2015-02-24  Sam Varshavchik  <mr...@courier-mta.com>

            * Add the makeimapaccess script.



No mention that this config parameter is now mandatory.

Our only hint is that this probably works just like makesmtpaccess does.
    http://www.courier-mta.org/makesmtpaccess.html

Here is what that line in my esmtpd file looks like:
    ACCESSFILE=${sysconfdir}/smtpaccess

It looks like the package scripts already added me a imapaccess directory at some point. It's empty but that's fine.

Okay so I'll just add this to my /etc/courier/imapd:
    IMAPACCESSFILE=${sysconfdir}/imapaccess

Problem solved. Packages install fine now.



As for what to do about this, I don't know. Feels like stupid all the way uphill. I don't think IMAPACCESSFILE is supposed to be mandatory-required in a config. That makeimapaccess should be smart enough to not die horribly when run against a valid config. And/or it should provide a tiny hint about what went wrong. The whole thing needs to be documented.