Re: [Dovecot] Couldn't open INBOX: Timeout while waiting for lock

On Fri, 2009-06-12 at 14:09 -0400, Eric Sammons wrote:

Hi,

So I've been through google and the dovecot source and have not yet found a reasonable explanation for the 'Timeout while waiting for lock' error. My customer's configuration is utilizes mbox with the following mbox configs.

[snip] pop3_lock_session = yes

What it means is that you have this enabled and user tries to log in with POP3 while another POP3 session already exists and isn't dying after 5 minutes. Some possible reasons:

• User using multiple POP3 clients?
• User using dialup and connection dies while downloading messages?
• User has huge mailboxes that take a long time to download?

In any case setting pop3_lock_session=no gets rid of these errors, although that then violates POP3 RFC.