I thought I was imaging it but... I have a friend (honestly) that likes to clear his inbox every month by copying older into a folder (e.g. June-2009). Every month he complains that all the mail in the new folder has disappeared. This has happened three times now, and he's sort-of-right. I now believe it's a bug rather than him.
The setup is Dovecot 1.1.3 on FreeBSD 7.0 and the client is Outlook 2003 SP3 (using IMAP).
What you end up with is a folder called June-2009 with no messages visible. Outlook reckons it's completely empty - size 0. I don't know how he gets to this point, but it can't be anything that bizarre - just copying messages. It's happened three months in a row. However, he can't see the contents and I can't see the contents using Outlook. Strangely, Eudora and Squirrel have no problem.
Corrupt mbox file? Probably not. If you copy the problem one, the copy works fine. The really weird thing is that if you rename the problem file (using mv) it STILL DOESN'T work. I've considered the possibility that it's got a bad lock on it, but if so, how come Squirrel and Eudora have no problem?
I've searched as far as I can for any known problems using Outlook.
What next?
Thanks, Frank.
====================================================== # 1.1.3: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf log_path: /var/log/dovecot protocols: imap imaps pop3 pop3s ssl_cert_file: /etc/mail/certs/dovecot-cert.pem ssl_key_file: /etc/mail/certs/dovecot-private.pem disable_plaintext_auth: no login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login login_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login login_greeting_capability(default): yes login_greeting_capability(imap): yes login_greeting_capability(pop3): no verbose_proctitle: yes first_valid_uid: 1000 first_valid_gid: 1000 mail_privileged_group: mail mail_location: mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/mail/%u maildir_copy_preserve_filename: yes mail_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3 mail_process_size: 512 mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/pop3 imap_client_workarounds(default): delay-newmail netscape-eoh tb-extra-mailbox-sep imap_client_workarounds(imap): delay-newmail netscape-eoh tb-extra-mailbox-sep imap_client_workarounds(pop3): pop3_enable_last(default): no pop3_enable_last(imap): no pop3_enable_last(pop3): yes pop3_client_workarounds(default): pop3_client_workarounds(imap): pop3_client_workarounds(pop3): outlook-no-nuls oe-ns-eoh auth default: mechanisms: plain login username_format: %Ln process_size: 512 passdb: driver: pam args: session=yes dovecot userdb: driver: passwd args: blocking=yes socket: type: listen client: path: /var/run/dovecot/auth-client mode: 432 master: path: /var/run/dovecot/auth-master mode: 384