I have been using dovecot with gnus for a long time. Recently, I started getting failures, and I think it's a dovecot problem triggered by gnus being more aggressive, but I'd like to hear opinions about whether I should pursue this as a gnus bug.
The log shows:
Oct 25 19:27:36 gdtserver dovecot: IMAP(gdt): Panic: Trying to close mailbox foo.bar with open transactions Oct 25 19:27:36 gdtserver dovecot: dovecot: child 26231 (imap) killed with signal 6 (core not dumped - set mail_drop_priv_before_exec=yes)
and this seems to be triggered when dovecot is going GCC: to a local mailbox (not imap) when sending, but also semi-randomly.
most of dovecot -n: (I'm sure that I'm not having auth problems and would rather not post that part):
# 1.2.14: /usr/pkg/etc/dovecot.conf
# OS: NetBSD 5.1_RC1 i386
protocols: imaps
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable: /usr/pkg/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_processes_count: 4
login_max_processes_count: 16
max_mail_processes: 32
first_valid_uid: 128
mail_location: maildir:~/IMAP
I have 162 mailboxes polled by gnus on this dovecot instance. I get the panic on various mailboxes and I can't see a pattern.
I do get
Checking new news... nnimap-send-command: SIGPIPE raised on process *nnimap*; closed it
From gnus. I then look at the listed one in the panic, and *imap-log* From gnus. This just may be an artifact of pipelining, but the panic-list mbox has 30 more after it that were sent, as in:
19:35:43 506 EXAMINE "mbox.named-in-panic" (QRESYNC (1208908407 1)) [30 more lines]
I'm guessing that this is a dovecot problem. I realize I should update to 1.2.15 :-) but I didn't see anything in the 1.2.15 release notes that looks like a match.