[Dovecot] Unusual behaviour

[Mark Lidstone]

Ahh!  Now you've explained it, it makes a lot of sense.

Many thanks,

Mark Lidstone
IT and Network Support Administrator

BMT SeaTech Ltd
Grove House, Meridians Cross, 7 Ocean Way
Ocean Village, Southampton.  SO14 3TJ. UK
Tel: +44 (0)23 8063 5122         
Fax: +44 (0)23 8063 5144

E-Mail:  mailto:mark.lidstone at bmtseatech.co.uk
Website: www.bmtseatech.co.uk
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-----Original Message-----
From: Timo Sirainen [mailto:tss at iki.fi] 
Sent: 23 August 2004 09:07
To: Mark Lidstone
Cc: dovecot at dovecot.org
Subject: RE: [Dovecot] Unusual behaviour


On Mon, 2004-08-23 at 08:48 +0100, Mark Lidstone wrote:
> Is it supposed to give the current time and date in the error message.

> I've no problem with it giving an "internal error" message to the 
> client, but I am a little confused about the time being in there. 
> That's all I'm asking about.

Client should never see any "real" error messages to make sure no extra
information about the system gets leaked. So any time something
unexpected happens, Dovecot gives the "internal error" message to user
while writing the real error to log file.

The timestamp is there to help sysadmin find the real error message from
log files when user gives a copy&pasted internal error message. Instead
of timestamp I guess there could be also some unique identifier which
could be grepped from logs but I think timestamp is better.

And about the original problem of giving "internal error" when Dovecot
process didn't have access to some maildir.. Maybe it could have replied
"Permission denied" to client in that case. It already does in several
cases, but I guess the problem here was that it was trying to create the
missing dirs but couldn't. I'll look over all these permission issues
properly when creating real shared folder support.