[Dovecot] Timeout while waiting for lock....

[Rob Frohne]

Hi,

I'm very new to administering mail, and this is surely a newbie 
question.  I  have my own IMAP mail server because I use my email as a 
way of filing important things, and I subscribe to a number of lists 
that I like to archive.  I have about 40 mailboxes with up to 80,000 
messages in some, and one with 40,000 messages is almost a Gigabyte in 
size.  The total size is around 4 Gigabytes.  Things were working quite 
well until I upgraded to OS X 10.4 and its new Mail.app mail client and 
then everything was too slow.  I was using the UW IMAP server (2002d if 
I recall right) and Mail.app 1.3.9.  I tried upgrading the server to the 
latest, but it didn't improve things noticeably.  I swapped to dovecot 
1.0alpha1, and used the mbox format, but that wasn't any better.  I read 
that Maildir format was better, so I converted my mail to that format 
and tried that.  It didn't seem much better.  I tried to compile Cyrus 
on OS X and ran into all kinds of difficulty.  I finally tried Cyrus on 
a Linux box, and turned off all my rules that move messages around.  In 
comparing this to dovecot on my OS X box, Cyrus loads the messages 
significantly faster.  I think there are some problems with my dovecot 
setup though.  My mail.log is filled with this type of thing. 

Sep 15 16:43:51 cubex-wwc-edu dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<frohro>, 
method=PLAIN, rip=172.17.128.191, lip=10.7.3.11
Sep 15 16:44:43 cubex-wwc-edu dovecot: imap(frohro): Timeout while 
waiting for lock for transaction log file 
/Users/frohro/Maildir/dovecot.index.log
Sep 15 16:44:57 cubex-wwc-edu dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<frohro>, 
method=PLAIN, rip=172.17.128.191, lip=10.7.3.11
Sep 15 16:45:51 cubex-wwc-edu dovecot: imap(frohro): Timeout while 
waiting for lock for transaction log file 
/Users/frohro/Maildir/dovecot.index.log

I've tried mutt, evolution, kmail,  and am now using Thunderbird, and 
am  working on getting Mail.app to import an archive of my 4 Gigs of 
mail, thinking if nothing else works, I can have a copy of that on the 
clients I use, though I like having it on the server better.

Can anyone suggest something to fix my problems, besides deleting all my 
email?

Thanks,

Rob