On 12/07/2009 11:41 AM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Mon, 2009-12-07 at 08:29 -0700, Erinn Looney-Triggs wrote:
I am trying to track down an mbox corruption issue that has been happening for one of our users. It appears that the mbox file is getting truncated and the all important From line no longer exists which then leads to the mbox being useless. It also appears, as in most truncations, that parts of the mbox are being lost.
Can you give me some specific examples of what the corruption looks like? For example you could put the mbox through http://dovecot.org/tools/mbox-anonymize.pl
I am not sure how to debug this to find out whether this is a client or server issue and any pointers would be appreciated.
Client can't corrupt mailbox data no matter what they do. But it's possible that the user/client is doing something a bit differently than everyone else and that causes it.
What OS and filesystem do you use? It's a local filesystem and not NFS or something? Does Dovecot log any errors (about anything)?
I can dig up a copy of a malformed mbox and I will get it to you. As for the other details This is a RHEL5 x64 system running an ext3 file system, nothing fancy with NFS. Dovecot does not appear to log any errors, I looked back and there was one error logged a couple of days before the issue occurred but I am not sure if it is related:
Dec 2 11:19:07 dovecot: IMAP(XXXX): Next message unexpectedly lost from mbox file /home/XXXX/mail/Sent at 2102537 (cached) Dec 2 11:19:07 dovecot: IMAP(XXXX): read(mail, uid=501) failed: Invalid argument Dec 2 11:19:07 dovecot: IMAP(XXXX): Disconnected: Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information. [2009-12-02 11:19:07] bytes=177474/43685174
But as I said this occurred a couple of days before the corruption issue, or at least before the user became aware of the corruption, though this user is connected all day every day.
Anyway I will dig around for a copy of the corrupted mbox files.
Thanks, -Erinn