[Dovecot] cannot update mailbox - unable to lock for exclusive access

[1st WebDesigns]

On 08/11/2012 23:53, Ben Morrow wrote:
> At  3AM -0600 on  8/11/12 you (Stan Hoeppner) wrote:
>>
>> 1.0.7 is absolutely ancient and no longer officially supported.  You
>> need 1.2.x minimum, 2.x.x even better.  And you say you just recently
>> upgraded your Linux distro?  What planet do you live on son?  You're a
>> few light years behind current stable software.
>
> [A light-year is a measure of distance, not of time.]
>
>> LDA completely eliminates lock contention.
>
> As we have discussed before, using the LDA does not prevent lock
> contention, it just prevents the problems that arise when different
> software is using different locking strategies on the same mailbox
> (assuming nothing except LDA and imap is touching the mailbox directly).
>
> There are valid reasons for not using the LDA: the OP might be already
> using procmail, for instance, and have users with procmail recipies
> which sort into IMAP folders. These folders will need to be locked by
> procmail even if the default delivery to INBOX is changed (globally) to
> happen through dovecot-lda. While migrating to sieve (and mdbox, and
> LMTP) would, IMHO, be the best long-term solution, this isn't necessarily
> something that can be set up overnight.
>
> Ben
>
>
>
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>
>

Thanks for your replies.  I switched to Dovecot LDA this morning, but 
the issue still persists, albeit logged slightly differently by Dovecot 
now instead of Postfix:

"save failed to INBOX: Timeout while waiting for lock"

The reason is because some pop3 clients are holding their connection for 
5 or 6 minutes (don't ask me why - and the iPhone seems to be the major 
culprit).

In dovecot.conf I changed:

mbox_lock_timeout = 300

to

mbox_lock_timeout = 600

Which seems to have helped.  I am unclear if this value only applied to 
Dovecot LDA or if it would have worked previously before switching to 
Dovecot LDA?