[Dovecot] Two strange behaviours with dovecot+postfix+squirrelmail

[Francisco Neira]

Hi all,

About a week ago I was forced to migrate my main (production) email server from RH9 to
Centos4.1. The installation has dovecot-0.99.11 + postfix-2.1.5 and >600 mbox accessed email
accounts.

Number 1. Some users accessing thru squirremail (installed in my webserver) can read their
INBOX at /var/spool/mail directory but when trying to delete a message they receive the
following error message from squirrelmail:

ERROR: Could not complete request.
Consulta: COPY 1279 "mail/Trash"
Reason Given: Internal error occured. Error report written to server log. [2005-09-16 15:08:04]

and the error logged is the following:
Sep 16 15:09:27 mail imap(username): mkdir_parents(/home/username//mail/.imap/Trash) failed:
Permission denied

I never stated that .imap/Trash when configuring dovecot and the strangest thing is that my
account, as most of others, can delete messages moving from /var/spool/mail/my_name to
/home/my_name/mail/Trash

Number 2. Randomly, some users connecting from Mozilla Thunderbird via IMAP get an error
message telling that there has been an error connecting to INBOX. Watching the maillog I
found the following:

Sep 16 13:07:43 mail imap(otheruser): File isn't in mbox format: /var/spool/mail/otheruser

I accessed the user's inbox file with vi and found that there was a "--604" at the beginning
of the file. In other case I found that the file was beginning with a truncated email message.

Trying to "walk on the safer side", I changed the mbox_lock setting from "fcntl" to
"dotlock" in the /etc/dovecot.conf file.

Any suggestions and comments about his will be highly appreciated. Forgive me about my
English, it is not my native lanaguage.

Regards,


-- 
Francisco Neira B.
Administrador de Red
Defensoria del Pueblo
Lima, Peru, -05:00 UTC