[Dovecot] Effects of going read-only on dovecot & pop/imap clients

[Timo Sirainen]

On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 14:17 +0000, Mark Zealey wrote:
> 2009-02-19T14:03:19+00:00 mail2 dovecot: POP3(test2 at markandruth.co.uk):
> open() failed with file
> /var/spool/mail/supplier_2/ma/rk/an/markandruth.co.uk/te/st/2_/test2/Mai
> ldir/dovecot.index.log: Read-only file system
..
> Even when I use :INDEX=MEMORY, it's still complaining about creating
> .lock's or uidlist files and just issuing internal errors. Is there any
> way to make dovecot just do as much as it can under the circumstances ie
> allow read access to mails?

Are you talking about only POP3 clients? I suppose in theory it should
be possible, but it's such a special case that I'm not going to bother
making Dovecot support that. Dovecot really wants to create
dovecot-uidlist files. But I suppose you could just have it create them
to some temp directories:

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:CONTROL=/tmp/%u:INDEX=MEMORY

And be sure to use:

pop3_uidl_format = %f

> Also, has anyone got experience of how clients handle mailboxes being
> read-only? My guess is that pop clients would probably break and
> download the same messages over and over?

If client has configured to leave mail on server it should work, but if
not it probably breaks.
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