[Dovecot] Managesieve Automatic Homedir Creation: File not Found Error

[linuxer at netsteps.ch]

Hi all,

I'm running dovecot version 2.0.19 (Ubuntu 12.04) and I discovered some
unexpected behaviour related to the Dovecot managesieve module. When
connecting to the managesieve service from a client for the first time
(e.g. roundcube webmail), I get an application error. This is logged by
Dovecot:

Error: sieve-storage:
opendir(/var/.../exampledomain/exampleuser at exampledomain//sieve) failed:
No such file or directory.

At first glance I thought the problem was caused by the "//" in the
directory path. I assume this is just a concatenation of the user virtual
home directory (in my case
"/var/.../exampledomain/exampleuser at exampledomain/" and the default sieve
folder (~/sieve). While this looks wrong it seems not to be the actual
problem (should be fixed though?)

Then I noticed that the user home directory and sieve data were actually
properly created despite the error. When connecting again, it worked
without error. The problem can be reproduced by deleting the users virtual
home directory and connecting again.

A guess would be that the automatic creation of the virtual users homedir
folder structure is some asychronous process not being completed in time.

I also found this older thread with a similar issue:
http://osdir.com/ml/dovecot-development/2010-05/msg00018.html

Could also be worth mentioning that I'm running Dovecot on a virtualized
host with possibly relatively poor I/O performance (maybe faster
environments don't have this problem).

Thanks for looking into this, and thx for the really neat dovecot software
package!

Cheers,
L.