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

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 16:33 -0400, Brett Dikeman wrote:
> >> Apr 22 00:08:34 host dovecot: IMAP(user): Fixed a duplicate:
> >> 1240289413.9181_0.host:2,S.lock -> 1240373314.P6717Q0M159857.host
> >
> > Something's very wrong if .lock files are created to Maildir mail files.
> > It looks as if the Maildir is somehow being used as a mbox or something
> > else is very weird. Try to figure out what is creating those .lock
> > files..
> 
> The only things we have that touch mail on that system are dovecot and
> procmail.  We don't export /var/spool/mail, and this is a pretty
> minimal debian system install.  Ie, no funky desktop indexing programs
> or the like.
> 
> The users affected have no immediate commonalities- no common clients,
> most are IMAP but 1-2 are POP, some were logged out after timeout
> while others logged out properly, etc.

It's something that's running on the server.

> The lock files are one possible problem, but it is a HUGE problem that
> Dovecot is converting them into root-owned zero-length emails!

Dovecot isn't converting them. They're initially zero size and created
by root and they just shouldn't be there. The best Dovecot could do to
them would be to simply ignore all files ending with ".lock", but I
don't really see a point in working around something that really
shouldn't be happening in the first place.

Since they're created by root, it's some process running as root that's
creating them. Maybe some backup solution?
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