[Dovecot] Mbox corruption - Inbox beginning with 'FFrom' or 'FrFrom'

[Timo Sirainen]

On 19.6.2013, at 16.00, Dimos Alevizos <dalevizo at otenet.gr> wrote:

> we're having some problems with our dovecot setup.
> I've seen similar problems in the mailing list some years ago but alas wasn't able to find a solution.
> 
> Our setup is as follows :
> An MX farm (postfix) sends mails via LMTP to a director farm (dovecot 2.1.12) which proxies pop3/imap/lmtp traffic to a dovecot farm (dovecot 2.1.16).
> All mailboxes and indexes are on NFS and all servers are Centos.
> 
> The problem is that at times we see mailboxes (all of them are in mbox format) beginning with FFrom or FrFrom and of course dovecot says it's not a valid mbox file.

This is quite an old bug, but it happens rarely enough that I haven't been able to reproduce and fix it. Actually people hadn't complained about it for a long time now, so I had assumed it had somehow gotten fixed already.

With the attached debug patch it should crash instead of (completely) corrupting the mbox file. Debugging the resulting core file with gdb could be useful in figuring this out.

Although I wouldn't recommend mbox format for any big installation anyway..

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