[Dovecot] great disappearing email mystery

[Jack Stewart]

dhottinger at harrisonburg.k12.va.us wrote:
> Quoting Jack Stewart <jstewart at caltech.edu>:
> 
>>
>>
>> dhottinger at harrisonburg.k12.va.us wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 17:27 -0500, dhottinger at harrisonburg.k12.va.us
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> Have there been any issues with dovecot and using outlook express
>>>>> (imap) as an email client?  I have had a couple of users come up with
>>>>> random missing emails.  Im trying to figure out if it is user error,
>>>>> or something wacky in my mailserver.   I cant find anything telling in
>>>>> maillog files or my messages.  Dovecot version is 1.0.3.  Its ok to
>>>>> reply to me, I get list messages digest.
>>>>
>>
>> Is it missing in the mail server or just on the client? What does your
>> server layout look like?
>>
>> We had a similar issue with Outlook and AppleMail where the uidlist
>> would change just enough to wipe out their local index. People would
>> tell us that they could see the E-mail in webmail but not in their
>> client.
>>
>> We haven't had the issue in a long while, but it was painful while it
>> lasted. The key to resolving the issue had to do with upgrades to the
>> dovecot version - we currently just made the jump to 1.1.11 and it
>> seems to be working well.  Shes been up almost a year now without a 
>> reboot, with close to 750 accounts.
>>
>> ---Jack
> 
> Jack,
> My server is a linux box running sendmail, procmail, and dovecot, I use 
> ldap on the backend.  Most of my clients use Horde for webmail, but I 
> have some that use outlook.  The emails are missing, missing.  Neither 
> on client or server.  Thing is I looked on my backups (7 days worth) and 
> supposedly missing emails werent there either.  So its hard to tell how 
> long they have been missing.  Also, this server was put online 2 years 
> ago, so all mailboxes were migrated from the oldserver to the new one 
> and renamed oldmail.  Nothing in their either.  Were there any gotcha's 
> on the upgrade?  Im not one to upgrade unless there are security issues 
> or problems and my mailserver has been extremely stable
> 

That is a mystery - nothing to do with my environment.

If I understand you correctly, nothing has changed in two years and some 
users are now having missing messages. Assuming that this is the case, 
my money is on the E-mail clients.