[Dovecot] Couldn't init INBOX: Can't sync mailbox: Messages keep getting expunged

[David Jonas]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> I finally figured out what's happening:
> 
> v1.0 writes expunges as plain "expunged" records to dovecot.index.log
> file. v1.1 treats such records as "expunge requests", while the actual
> expunging is done by writing another "expunged (ext)" record.
> 
> With v1.1 dovecot.index file isn't always required, because its contents
> can be produced by reading dovecot.index.log file, assuming that is the
> first generated log file (prev log file sequence=0 in header).
> 
> So what happens is that for some reason v1.1 doesn't read dovecot.index
> file, but reads dovecot.index.log file and ignores all expunge records.
> Maildir new/ and cur/ mtimes are all the same as in index files, so
> Dovecot doesn't bother reading the maildir.
> 
> I was able to reproduce this by deleting dovecot.index file, but not
> without deleting it. So if it exists and you still have this problem, I
> don't really know why it wouldn't have read it..
> 
> Anyway, this fixes the problem:
> http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-1.1/rev/b776f2b8d827

Well, it looked good but pop3 processes started accumulating and pretty 
soon the load was over 50. No errors were getting logged. strace showed 
some processes waiting for disk and others being served their mail. 
IO-wait was bouncing off 100%.

Applied the patch to a different box (exact same config) that had been 
running rc4 for about three days and it seems okay.