[Dovecot] troubles with broken clients (iPhone) - again

[Federico Bianchi]

On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-07-07 at 10:02 +0200, Federico Bianchi wrote:
>> The symptoms: when the Mail application is "closed" on the iPhone, Outlook
>> still says the mailbox is in use; a Dovecot imap process is still active
>> for that user even after a few minutes (manually killing it releases the
>> lock, thereby leaving the inbox available for Outlook).
>
> That's strange. Normally an IMAP process shouldn't be holding any locks
> at all. Can you check if there are any *.lock files that get deleted
> when killing the imap process?
>
>> that's why I asked you whether there is a way to tell Dovecot only
>> one POP3 or IMAP process from the same user, the latest one, can be active
>> at the same time, closing and disconnecting all the others.
>
> No.
>
>> pop3_lock_session(pop3): yes
>
> This means that during the whole POP3 session Dovecot locks the mailbox
> by creating dovecot-uidlist.lock. If it can't, it gives the "mailbox is
> in use" error. So I could understand if there was a long-running pop3
> process holding the lock, but imap processes really shouldn't be doing
> that..

In fact - that's what puzzled me.

To have a simpler test case, this afternoon I upgraded Dovecot to the 
latest release leaving only the mbox storage (we are planning to convert 
to maildir in September) and, even if I don't think there is any relation 
with our issue, set that server MTA (Exim 4.69) to use both fcntl and dot 
lock files.

The user who got the bizarre situation should be back in a few days; 
should the problem be still there, I'll sure tell you all.

Thanks a lot again; regards

 	 		Federico Bianchi
 			Dipartimento di Storia delle Arti
 			Universita` di Pisa
 			piazza S.Matteo in Soarta, 2 - I56127 Pisa (Italy)
 			fax.+39-050-580128; e-mail: <f.bianchi at arte.unipi.it>
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