[Dovecot] Again: Occasional problem with POP3-Download

[Andre Tann]

Hello everyone,

in february I posted the mail below[1].

I can now reproduce the problem. When filling up a mailbox with postfix'
smtp-source with dozens of identical mails, then it is never possible
for me to fetch one single mail out of the mailbox. The process of
fetching mail via POP3 always fails. It makes no difference which mail
client I use. I have tested KMail, Outlook and Thunderbird.

Can anyone confirm this? Is dovecot for some reason unable to deliver
such identical mails?

Can it be the case that this is a problem with too similar message ids?

~/Maildir/cur$ cat * | grep -i message-id
Message-Id: <1024.0003.0008 at alphamobil>
Message-Id: <1024.0003.0009 at alphamobil>
Message-Id: <1024.0003.0006 at alphamobil>
Message-Id: <1024.0003.0007 at alphamobil>
Message-Id: <1024.0003.0005 at alphamobil>
Message-Id: <1024.0003.0004 at alphamobil>
Message-Id: <1024.0003.0003 at alphamobil>
Message-Id: <1024.0003.0002 at alphamobil>
Message-Id: <1024.0003.0001 at alphamobil>
Message-Id: <1024.0003.0000 at alphamobil>

Thanks and greetings from Munich!
AT




[1]
Hello everyone,

I have two mailservers [1] running dovecot. Mail store format is
maildir. Every once in a while I have the following problem: When a User
downloads his mail via POP3, the client says something like "the server
has closed the connection unexpectedly, and gives this reason:
[...blahblah...]". 

One can now cancel the download, and restart it, and the problem shows
up again and again. The first few mails get downloaded, and then the
process stops.

Strange to say the "blahblah"-portion is a piece of text out of the
email that doesn't want to get downloaded. 

Then I remove this single message out of the Maildir/cur-directory, and
everything is fine again.  It is easy to figure out which mail to delete
because it's the first one that is not market as seen

	[...]
	filename...:2,S
	otherfilename...;2,   <= this file must be deleted
	[...]


For me it looks as if dovecot had a problem with some byte sequence in
this mail, and for some reason it gives an error message to the client
which is taken out of the mail.

On the SuSE-Machine, before dovecot there was a courier-imapd running,
which never showed this kind of problem, so it should not be a client
problem.

Hopefully my description is clear enough. 

Does anyone have an idea what's going on here?


Thanks.
Andre



[1]
One machine is a openSuSE 11.2 with 

# rpm -qa | grep dovecot
dovecot12-backend-sqlite-1.2.9-0.1.1.i586
dovecot12-backend-mysql-1.2.9-0.1.1.i586
dovecot12-backend-pgsql-1.2.9-0.1.1.i586
dovecot12-1.2.9-0.1.1.i586

The other machine is a Debian Lenny with

# dpkg -l | grep dovecot                                                 
dovecot-common 1:1.0.15-2.3+lenny1
dovecot-imapd  1:1.0.15-2.3+lenny1
dovecot-pop3d  1:1.0.15-2.3+lenny1

-- 
Andre Tann