Upgrading Dovecot v2.0 to v2.1

v2.1 is mostly compatible with v2.0 configuration, except:

  • 15-mailboxes.conf included in the default configuration now specifies a few default SPECIAL-USE RFC 6154 mailboxes. This file assumes that you already have namespace inbox { .. } specified (in 10-mail.conf). If you don’t, you’ll get errors about namespaces. Note that the namespace’s name must be “inbox” (as well as usually include inbox=yes setting). The solution is to either make sure that you have such a namespace defined, or you can simply delete the 15-mailboxes.conf if you don’t care about SPECIAL-USE.

  • Plugins now use UTF-8 mailbox names rather than mUTF-7: acl, autocreate plugin, expire plugin, trash plugin, virtual plugin

  • Usernames in authentication are now lowercased by default. See

    • Non-lowercase usernames in password/user database result in “unknown user” errors

    • To allow mixed case usernames again, set auth_username_format= (i.e. to empty)

  • fts-solr plugin full text search backend changed to use mailbox GUIDs instead of mailbox names, requiring reindexing everything. solr_old backend can be used with old indexes to avoid reindexing, but it doesn’t support some newer features.

  • Expire plugin: Only go through users listed by userdb iteration. Delete dict rows for nonexistent users, unless expire_keep_nonexistent_users=yes.

  • dsync was merged into doveadm. There is still dsync symlink pointing to doveadm, which you can use the old way for now. The preferred ways to run dsync are doveadm sync (for old dsync mirror) and doveadm backup.

  • dsync protocol isn’t compatible with v2.0’s dsync, so you can’t dsync between v2.0 and v2.1 servers.