[Dovecot] Overloading IMAP Server

[Steffen Kaiser]

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On Mon, 21 Jan 2013, Harford, Ken wrote:

>            I am having an issue with dovecot IMAP reading and writing to 
> one specific mailbox. I have a check email delivery script that sends

What's the purpose of the verification:

+ The prompt delivery?

+ The delivery at all?

+ The correct delivery?

> out a email and then logs into dovecot to check if the mailbox that the 
> message has been delivered to. However, the servers that send these 
> messages send them in bunches depending on how many postfix spools it is 
> checking. So I could get 60 messages all being sent to 1 mailbox and 
> then having to read that same mailbox to check if the message actually 
> got delivered.
>
> I am getting a lot of  errors such as the following:
>
> Could not connect to IMAP server
> imap failed: IMAP RECEIVE CRITICAL - Could not select INBOX

Is this an error logged by Dovecot?

> Any ideas as to what I can tweak in dovecot to allow these messages to be verified.

a)
Wait a bit before logging into the IMAP server and check the messages 
sequentionally, not in parallel. E.g. your script could synchronize itself 
with other parallel instances by a shared lock.

b)
Use mail_log and a script on the mail server monitoring Dovecot logs and 
register delivered message ids and/or recipient. Then figure out a good 
way to probe, if one pariticular message has been seen.
- -or-
make note of message id/recipient on the sender side, somehow push (ssh or 
something) that information on regular basis to the mail server, where a 
script verifies that data.

c) To verify the correct delivery: use some sort of checksumming.

Kind regards,

- -- 
Steffen Kaiser
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