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

[Dimos Alevizos]

Hi,

I haven't had the time to compile it yet, but a question just occurred.
Given that it's so rare and we can't reproduce it on a dev server, how 
safe is this to use on a production server ?
When you say "crash" you mean the whole dovecot server or that specific 
client's child ?

D.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Dovecot] Mbox corruption - Inbox beginning with 'FFrom' or 
'FrFrom'
From: dalevizo <dalevizo at otenet.gr>
To: Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi>
CC: dovecot at dovecot.org, Dimitris Paouris <dpaou at otenet.gr>
Date: 24/06/2013 01:41 μμ

> Thanx I'll try the patch as soon as possible and I'll let you know.
> It is indeed very rare. We're only seeing 4-5 corruptions in about 13
> million logins per day.
> I've been trying to convince our design team that we should move to
> maildir, but the truth is that it's quite a change, and we're way too
> busy to deal with everything else AND a migration from mbox to maildir.
>
> D.
>
> On Mon 24/06/2013 13:16, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> 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..
>>
>
>
>>
>>
>