[Dovecot] UW-IMAP style mbox snarfing from /var/mail/ to ~/mbox

[Bernd Kuhls]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On 10.6.2007, at 23.10, Bernd Kuhls wrote:
> 
>> This mailbox is snarfed by Dovecot each time the Inbox is opened,
>> because the mail is not deleted from /var/mail$user, although Dovecot
>> successfully snarfed the mail to /home/$user/.imap_mail/inbox.
>> /home/$user is not overquota.
> 
> Check your error log. I'm pretty sure there's something in there 
> (http://wiki.dovecot.org/Logging).
> 

Hi,

nothing interesting found.
The only message I saw, and which I would see disabled, is this one:

Jun 10 22:33:33 bach dovecot: IMAP(ulfb): stat() failed with mbox file 
/var/mail/someuser: No such file or directory

someuser is a valid mail user, where Dovecot uses
/home/someuser/.imap_mail/ to store email, but Exim has never created
/var/mail/someuser because the user never was over-quota.
Having this log message all the time when 100+ users are using their
mail accounts is a bit nasty;-)

Here are the log entries of a user with /var/mail/$user present:

Jun 10 22:22:27 bach dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<user>, 
method=plain, rip=x.x.x.x, lip=y.y.y.y.y, TLS
Jun 10 22:27:24 bach dovecot: IMAP(user): Disconnected: Logged out

During this imap session the mails from /var/mail/$user were
snarfed to $HOME/.imap_mail/inbox, but the snarfed mails from
/var/mail/$user were not deleted.

Jun 10 22:28:47 bach dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<user>, 
method=plain, rip=x.x.x.x, lip=y.y.y.y, TLS
Jun 10 22:28:53 bach dovecot: IMAP(user): Disconnected: Logged out
Jun 10 22:29:00 bach dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<user>, 
method=plain, rip=x.x.x.x, lip=y.y.y.y, TLS
Jun 10 22:29:03 bach dovecot: IMAP(user): Disconnected: Logged out

Then I restarted the mailclient (Thunderbird 2.0) twice, the mails
from /var/mail/$user were snarfed again and I saw these mails
three times in my imap inbox. No other log messages are present
and /var/mail/$user still holds the mails already snarfed three
times. Only from a file with mbox index the mails get deleted
during snarf process by Dovecot.

Greetings, Bernd Kuhls