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how do you remove a deleted user's cyrus mailbox?

Hi everyone,

I am having a little trouble with a user's account on Mac OS X 10.4.8 Server. This is a short description of what has happened.

1. Created a user in WGM.
2. User then sends and recieves lots of email over a long period, with no apparent issues and uses the webmail interface as well as pop3 mail application on home PC (as expected!).
3. User uses webmail one day and discovers a server error in red writing.
4. Semi intelligent server admin guy (me) decides to delete the user account in WGM and then re-create the user in WGM in the hope of deleting the mailbox in the process.
5. Semi intelligent server admin guy discovers that the delete/re-create procedure doesnt remove the mailbox so he decides to search apple support forums.

Hence the reason for this post. Can anybody show me how to delete the mailbox for a user, either in GUI server admin or WGM or even terminal?

Also I have tried adding the diradmin account to the list of cyrus admins in imapd.conf so that the IMAP application can access all mailboxes but I only get read access, so I cant delete it that way, well unless I skipped a step.

Thanks in advance,
Kyran McGlasson

Power Mac Mirror Doors, Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Jan 15, 2007 11:01 PM

Reply
16 replies

Oct 8, 2018 1:20 PM in response to Krazy Kyran

Hi it's Nigel here who wrote Sir Admin.

I've been a bit flat out lately as I'm moving from Australia to the US for a new job, but have been noticing a bunch of people coming through to http://explanatorygap.net from this page in my stats, so thought I should post 🙂

The way Cyrus permissions for admin users work takes a little bit of time to get used to. This should be covered in the Sir Admin help, but essentially an admin user doesn't actually have full permissions over all mailboxes. They do however have the permission to set permissions however they want 🙂


So to do what you want, it sounds like you need to assign the privileges for the given user to those mailboxes, and then assign privileges to yourself if you want to then manipulate them.

Oct 8, 2018 1:20 PM in response to Rob Reuland

check my post above.

The way admin users work with Cyrus is that they don't by default have full permissions over everything.

They do however have the ability to set permissions however they want... so somewhat counter-intuitively, you have to give yourself the permissions to be able to delete a mailbox before you can delete it....

Oct 8, 2018 1:20 PM in response to Rob Reuland

so if you want to delete a mailbox using SirAdmin, it's essentially the same process as in that pdf, just using hte GUI elements.

1. Set an ACL on the given mailbox(es) so your admin user has the privileges to delete the mailbox (in that pdf it's "sam user/testuser admin all" )

2. Delete the given mailbox(es) (in that pdf it's "dm user/testuser")

Now whether you see "user/usertobedeleted" or "Other Users/usertobedeleted" depends on a bunch of factors, but it's not really important which way they appear.

I feel really slack about SirAdmin at the moment, as I just haven't had time to sort out a couple of bugs. I've had a few suggestions about turning it into a plugin for Mail.app or for Kiwiclient, which is something I'm considering.

Ideally I'd like to write it as a plugin for Server Admin, but I guess that would preclude the people who are using it to administer non-OS X Server mail servers.

Jan 17, 2007 5:27 AM in response to pterobyte

Great!

I have downloaded siradmin, and can modify acl's for user mailboxes. What a great utility!

However I cannot touch (change acls, delete mailbox, etc) for the user that I deleted and re-created. It seems that nobody has permissions to touch that particular user's mailbox folders. What do I do now?

I was considering using the mailbfr program to completely backup and restore the entire mail store. In the past I have been able to repair the mail store this way with success, as there is some form of checking involved in the mailbfr utility. Is this a sensible thing to do?

Regards,
Kyran McGlasson.

Apr 3, 2007 6:52 PM in response to Krazy Kyran

i cant for the life of me work this one out

so ive setup an admin user for cyrus as described in siradmin help
but when i log in with that username and password i only receive a list of mailboxes of that user not every user on the system?

so heres my problem; i have a number of users that come and go when they leave how do i delete their mailbox? deleting the user in workgroup manager just deletes the user from the directory but leaves the mailbox sitting on the server. i want to clear this up as some users mailboxes are quite large, will sir admin do this? or is there something im missing

cheers,

Apr 4, 2007 1:05 AM in response to Calum Hunter

will sir
admin do this? or is there something im missing


Yes and yes 😉

Give the instructions another read. Alternatively (or in combination) read...
Properly Deleting OS X 10.4.x Server Mail Users
at... http://osx.topicdesk.com/downloads/

In the latter, the instructions for 10.4 have a red asterix against them where this is diffent from original 10.3 instructions.

-david

Apr 14, 2007 2:45 PM in response to David_x

I'm having difficulty using SirAdmin. I added "admin" to my imapd.conf and also tried adding my admin's UID, but altho I can see the folders in SirAdmin (and in an email browser), when I attempt to delete any I'm told I lack permissions. (In a mail client the folders are grayed out.)

BTW, my imapd.conf file originally indicated cyrus as the admin, but I changed this to cyrusimap. I'm in Server 10.4.9.

Thanks, all.

Apr 14, 2007 3:17 PM in response to Community User

Yes, I saw that but was a tad puzzled. I see in your help file that you advise creating a new user for imap administration, but (lazy me) I just plugged my server admin into the imapd.conf file and did not create a separate user. My thinking was that the OSX Server mail manual states:

1 In Server Admin, select Mail in the Computers & Services pane.
2 Click Settings.
3 Select the General tab and select Enable IMAP, if it is not already checked.
4 Select an existing user or create a new user using Workgroup Manger to be an IMAP
administrator.
5 If you have not created a user record for the mail administrator’s account, see the user
management guide.
6 Open /etc/imapd.conf in a text editor.
If you are not comfortable using a terminal text editor like emacs or vi, you can use
TextEdit.
7 Find the line that reads “admins:”
8 Edit the line to add the UID number of the administrator account after the colon.
9 Save your changes.
10 In your email client application, create an account that uses IMAP to connect to your
mail service using the mail administrator name.
For more information, see the man page for imapd.conf.

And therefore I didn't think a separate user necessary. However, even using their method, I cannot connect to the folders via a client, so I gather you are correct!

So, I create a separate user, name him "imapadmin" or some such, mod the imapd.conf file accordingly, restart, and then . . . how do I give my new imapadmin the necessary permissions?

I can, by the bye, delete folders using the direct Cyrus Admin method spelled out on pterobyte's site here:

http://downloads.topicdesk.com/docs/ProperlyDeleting_OS_X_Server_MailUsers.pdf

Thanks for the quick reply (on a Saturday!) and for crafting this very cool GUI.

Lost count Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Apr 14, 2007 6:02 PM in response to Rob Reuland

Okay, I created a separate 'cyrusadmin' user, gave him an imap mailbox, added his name to imapd.conf, did a postfix reload, and restarted the mailserver.

When I create an acl for him in Siradmin, giving him all rights over the target folder, I still get permissions errors.

Worse, when I try the Cyrus admin terminal, I can delete some folders but other folders give me permissions errors.

What gives? Any ideas how to reset permissions on all cyrus files? I tried pterobyte's mailbfr -o, and it ran without error.

Apr 15, 2007 2:07 AM in response to Community User

I've had a few suggestions about turning it into a
plugin for Mail.app or for Kiwiclient, which is
something I'm considering.

Ideally I'd like to write it as a plugin for Server
Admin, but I guess that would preclude the people who
are using it to administer non-OS X Server mail
servers.


Nigel,

first of all thank you for your great tool.

Personally, I think standalone application and/or Server Admin plugin is the way to go.
Having it as plugin in a mail client, makes me shiver. I know that's personal, but I get so many support requests from unexperienced users, that I'd avoid having an admin tool inside a client app.

Having said that, I quite like it being a standalone application and don't even see the need of integration into SA. At least not as long as any kind of proper configuration of mail services requires bypassing SA anyway.

Just my 2 cents. 🙂

Again, thanks for this great tool.

Alex

Apr 15, 2007 2:16 AM in response to Rob Reuland

What gives? Any ideas how to reset permissions on all
cyrus files? I tried pterobyte's mailbfr -o, and it
ran without error.


Rob,

mailbfr -o only resets the file level permissions. It basically makes sure the files are under the right owner, so that cyrus can access them at all.
It will not change/fix any ACLs you have set with cyradm or SirAdmin. Those are stored in the mailboxes file in cyrus' configuration directory.

In case you manually deleted the mailbox in question from the file system, you can reconstruct it in SirAdmin, assign yourself all ACLs and delete it for good.

Alex

Apr 15, 2007 2:24 AM in response to Krazy Kyran

when i log into siradmin with my admin user that ive defined in imap.conf i only see the mailboxes for that user, not all users? is that normal?
also ive been able to delete mail boxes with siradmin by logging in as the user whose email i wish to delete and then deleting hte mailboxes but that does not delete the mail account. if i delete the account in workgroup manager that simply deletes the user record from LDAP but does not delete the account from cyrus, so how do i achieve this?

basically i want to completely delete a user from workgroup manager AND their email from my imap mail server.

thanks for any help

how do you remove a deleted user's cyrus mailbox?

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