Deprecation notice for mail-stack-delivery (dovecot) - planned to be dropped in 18.10

[Christian Ehrhardt]

Hello,
since Ubuntu 18.04 has reached feature freeze we started to think about
18.10.
One of the changes ahead is the dropping of the mail-stack-delivery package
(part of dovecot).

This package was created a long time ago with the intend to simplify
several steps of a mail server setup, for example to get a safe ssl secured
default installation.
It is essentially almost only a postinst to set up some better defaults.

But the bit that I can derive from bug reports and such indicates that it
is almost unused these days and has become an unused maintenance debt (it
started to show it's age - no more matching e.g. recommended ciphers).

Furthermore the world has moved on:
- For encryption ssl is now default in dovecot-core
- In general the hosting your own mail service has become less attractive
- If users want to set up a mail server still they often look more for e.g.
for Mail-in-a-box [1]

For all of these reasons we intend to drop the mail-stack-delivery package
in 18.10

If there is a big love/consumption of the package we might have missed
please speak up.
In that case we likely want to drop it from dovecot still, but community
could take over maintenance in a separate package that lives in universe.

[1]: https://mailinabox.email/


-- 
Christian Ehrhardt
Software Engineer, Ubuntu Server
Canonical Ltd
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