[Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed

[Adam McDougall]

Stewart Dean wrote:
> and here are some clients fighting over the lock
>> Mar  6 09:05:48 mercury mail:info imapd[970952]: Killed (lost mailbox 
>> lock) user
>> =xxxxx host=cpe-24-161-103-11.hvc.res.rr.com [24.161.103.11]
>> Mar  6 09:08:04 mercury mail:info imapd[844000]: Killed (lost mailbox 
>> lock) user
>> =xxxxx host=[10.40.70.71]
>> Mar  6 09:08:18 mercury mail:info imapd[2547784]: Killed (lost 
>> mailbox lock) use
>> r=xxxxx host=cpe-24-161-103-11.hvc.res.rr.com [24.161.103.11]
>
> All I know is that I had some moderately important people screaming at 
> me (I even heard the word useless) that the mail service was %^$#ed 
> up.  That after I made it dianetically clear (took 2 weeks) to them 
> that there Must Only Ever Be One Mail Client Open At A Time, they no 
> longer had problems.
>
We have some users that caused this too on uw-imap with mbox, they would 
get frustrated that deleted mail would come back as well.  I'm happy to 
say that Maildir with dovecot handles this extremely well, even on NFS 
with multiple servers in dovecot 1.1 since one of the later betas. 

You might consider how to direct your needy users to a mail server 
instance that has Maildir.  If you are afraid, or its difficult to wedge 
this into your current setup, you could have a completely different mail 
server host their mail, and you could use a MX server and/or a perdition 
IMAP proxy to redirect them invisibly to this other server once you've 
moved or copied their data.  I wanted to avoid this path and get the 
migration over with, but I caved in and started going after the power 
users and the low hanging fruit.  I'm very glad I did, because now I can 
migrate users one at a time and deal with any problems that arise on my 
schedule, and when I am prepared in the future, I can throw some 
switches and move the remaining users over that are unrealistic to 
handhold.