[Dovecot] Couldn't open INBOX: Timeout while waiting for lock

[Timo Sirainen]

On Fri, 2009-06-12 at 14:09 -0400, Eric Sammons wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> So I've been through google and the dovecot source and have not yet found
> a reasonable explanation for the 'Timeout while waiting for lock' error. 
> My customer's configuration is utilizes mbox with the following mbox
> configs.
> 
> [snip]
> pop3_lock_session = yes

What it means is that you have this enabled and user tries to log in
with POP3 while another POP3 session already exists and isn't dying
after 5 minutes. Some possible reasons:

 - User using multiple POP3 clients?
 - User using dialup and connection dies while downloading messages?
 - User has huge mailboxes that take a long time to download?

In any case setting pop3_lock_session=no gets rid of these errors,
although that then violates POP3 RFC.

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