El Capitan Sever Mail Problem

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El Capitan Sever Mail Problem

I am upgrading from Lion Server to El Capitan 10.11 Server. The Server is running on a Mac Pro 3,1 with multiple drives. The OS is on its own drive, data is on another. I built a new 10.11 server, then used Migration Assistant to bring in previous settings from old Lion Server. The upgrade went smoothly with the following exception.

My old Lion Server was set to store mail data not on the OS drive, rather on the separate data drive. This was a rather simple setting in the Server Admin App. When I log-in to the new 10.11 Server from client machines, no stored mail shows up in the Mail clients. If I run the old Lion Server, instead of the new 10.11 Server, client machines see it. At first, I thought that the 10.11 Server was not set to look for mail on the data drive. I changed the service data location for 10.11 Server to point to the data drive. (There did not seem to be a setting for mail data specifically, so I set all service data to use the alternate data drive. Stored mail still does not show up in the mail clients after this change.

I think I have the mail setting exactly the same on both servers. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), Migration from Lion Server

Posted on Feb 13, 2016 4:19 PM

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Answer 1

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pterobyte

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11,098 points

Feb 15, 2016 11:45 AM in response to sierraca

Did you enter the users from scratch on the new server or import them via Server.app? If you created new users, then chances are they have a new GUID and thus, the mailbox is there but not seen.

Have a look inside

/Library/Server/Mail/Data/mail

and look at the directory names, do they correspond to the GUID of your users?

This command should give you a list of your users and GUIDs:

sudo dscl /Search -list /Users GeneratedUID

(you can ignore the system users which mostly start with an underscore)

Also, look at the symbolic links inside

/Library/Server/Mail/Data/mail/users

Do they point to the right directories?

If all of the above checks out, peek inside

/Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/Library/Server/Mail/Config/postfix/main.cf

and

/Library/Server/Mail/Config/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf

to see if the paths to your mail data are correct.

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Answer 2

sierraca Author

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Feb 18, 2016 12:36 PM in response to pterobyte

Thank you so much!

I did import the users and the GUID were the same. Your command to generate the GUID was great. Now I have the list for future use.

Finally I looked at your suggestion to checkthe configuration file: /Library/Server/Mail/Config/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf At first it seemed to be pointing to the correct location on my alternate drive, but on closer examination, I discovered that under Lion Server, Mail data could be put anywhere (did not have to be with other server data). So I had put it on the root directory of my alternate drive. However, when El Capitan Server uses an alternate drive for data files, it places the files under: Library/Server/Mail/Data/u%.

What to do? It is probably best to begin using the updated location, rather than redirect to my non-standard location. Can I migrate the data for each user by copying it into their folder replacing all files in the folder?

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Answer 3

pterobyte

Level 6

11,098 points

Feb 16, 2016 2:25 AM in response to sierraca

As you suspect, keeping the configuration as close as possible to what Apple considers to be the correct one will save you from things going south after each update.

Dovecot is quite forgiving, so you should be fine with merging the old and the new user mail directories. Ideally use Terminal to copy them over and make sure you have a good backup of both first.

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Answer 4

sierraca Author

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Feb 18, 2016 12:40 PM in response to pterobyte

Moving the data did not work. Possibly because I did not correctly execute the move. However, I decided to start up under Lion Server, export the mailboxes, restart under El Capitan and import the mailboxes. This was time consuming because the folder structure must by recreated, but I took the time to make some changes that were overdue. Everything seems to be working well now. Thank you for your excellent advice! It is very appreciated.

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