[Dovecot] overnight clients causing lockfiles to be converted to root-owned messages on debian lenny

[Brett Dikeman]

Greetings all,

After running for more than a year without issue on debian lenny while
it was in the testing- we're now experiencing problems under
Lenny/Stable.

Dovecot now converts some sort of lockfile into messages, and they're
owned by root.  The result is a mess; clients can't read their
mailboxes with the root-owned files, and when the file is changed to
be owned by them, many mail clients don't like the zero-length message
(Outlook being one major client with this "problem".)

This happens to users who leave their email clients open overnight.  I
haven't found a cronjob that could be responsible for this.

Further details- 64 bit machine, we use maildir, /var/spool/mail is on
an xfs volume, and we run postfix, procmail, and spamassassin.
Dovecot version is 1.0.15; the machine is fully up-to-date with Debian
Stable (Lenny.)

Sample log entry of the aftermath; please pardon the sanitizing (host/username):

Apr 22 00:08:34 host dovecot: IMAP(user): Fixed a duplicate:
1240289413.9181_0.host:2,S.lock -> 1240373314.P6717Q0M159857.host
Apr 22 00:08:34 host dovecot: IMAP(user): Fixed a duplicate:
1240356531.15928_0.host:2,S.lock -> 1240373314.P9995Q3.host
Apr 22 00:08:34 host dovecot: IMAP(user):
open(/var/spool/mail/user/Maildir/cur/1240373314.P6717Q0M159857.host:2,)
failed: Permission denied

Brett