Stewart Dean wrote:
and here are some clients fighting over the lock
Mar 6 09:05:48 mercury mail:info imapd[970952]: Killed (lost mailbox lock) user =xxxxx host=cpe-24-161-103-11.hvc.res.rr.com [24.161.103.11] Mar 6 09:08:04 mercury mail:info imapd[844000]: Killed (lost mailbox lock) user =xxxxx host=[10.40.70.71] Mar 6 09:08:18 mercury mail:info imapd[2547784]: Killed (lost mailbox lock) use r=xxxxx host=cpe-24-161-103-11.hvc.res.rr.com [24.161.103.11]
All I know is that I had some moderately important people screaming at me (I even heard the word useless) that the mail service was %^$#ed up. That after I made it dianetically clear (took 2 weeks) to them that there Must Only Ever Be One Mail Client Open At A Time, they no longer had problems.
We have some users that caused this too on uw-imap with mbox, they would get frustrated that deleted mail would come back as well. I'm happy to say that Maildir with dovecot handles this extremely well, even on NFS with multiple servers in dovecot 1.1 since one of the later betas.
You might consider how to direct your needy users to a mail server instance that has Maildir. If you are afraid, or its difficult to wedge this into your current setup, you could have a completely different mail server host their mail, and you could use a MX server and/or a perdition IMAP proxy to redirect them invisibly to this other server once you've moved or copied their data. I wanted to avoid this path and get the migration over with, but I caved in and started going after the power users and the low hanging fruit. I'm very glad I did, because now I can migrate users one at a time and deal with any problems that arise on my schedule, and when I am prepared in the future, I can throw some switches and move the remaining users over that are unrealistic to handhold.