This isn't quite complete, it does help/fix some scenarios but appears %s (the service name) can be empty, causing an error for unknown column 'disable'. I'm looking into a fix for that.

Maybe someone else has an idea on this one (help!)- with this change, I like the results of doveadm user queries better, but when I run an expunge for trash/spam cleanup I get an error, which seems like %s didn't get set:

# /usr/bin/doveadm expunge -A \( mailbox Trash or mailbox SPAM or mailbox Junk or mailbox Deleted or mailbox Deleted\ Items \) savedbefore 30d Error: User listing returned failure doveadm: Error: Failed to iterate through some users

And mail.log shows:

Dec 20 17:10:55 mail-1 dovecot: auth-worker(3178): Error: sql: Iterate query failed: Unknown column 'disable' in 'where clause'

Maybe it's a dovecot bug (running debian stretch, dovecot 2.2.27-3+deb9u1)?

Did you try to escape just the variable?

Running debian jessie (dovecot 2.2.13-12~deb8u3), the patch also leads to the problems described by @jnorell .

doveadm expunge -A mailbox Junk savedbefore 30d

Results in the following error message:

doveadm: Error: User listing returned failure doveadm: Error: Failed to iterate through some users

As a temporary solution, I removed the part ``disable%Ls =' n'" because of this.

Does anyone have an idea what the iterate_query should read correctly?

I am having the same issue on Debian 9.3 with dovecot 2.2.27 (c0f36b0). When using doveadm the %L does not seem to be set.

iterate_query = SELECT email as user FROM mail_user WHERE server_id = '7'

Where server_id is The id of your mailserver.

Works for me Without any problems you need to put this in dovecot-sql.conf

iterate_query = SELECT email as user FROM mail_user WHERE disableimap = 'n'

Otherwise you get: doveadm(user@domain.tld): Info: User no longer exists, skipping

That 'User no longer exists' error is the original issue I started working on. Forcing the query to use the disableimap column would work for imap accounts, but consider a pop3-only installation where they intentionally have set disableimap=y for some or all users - then those pop3 accounts become out of reach for doveadm to act on them.

I'm sure there's a query that would include %s only if set, but I didn't figure it out in some work on it; I've been meaning to get back to this, but have just reverted to the original query on our system till I can do so.

@florian030 if I understand you correctly (ie. try disable`%Ls` ), I believe I did that as well, with the same results.