[Dovecot] Occasional problem with POP3-Download

[Andre Tann]

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