Hi,
a few days ago, we switched our site from pop3 to imap. We are running about 20 users with Netscape 7.0 on a FreeBSD-4.8 Server . I installed dovecot 0.9.99.1 via the freebsd-ports collection, which was as easy as make install and start dovecot. Our users mailboxes are still standart mbox format in /var/mail/(user), as it is default in Freebsd.
Now we suffer from a realy ugly problem, which was arising after the switch from pop3. When Netscape is newly started, it works fine as expected until Netscape displays messages corrupted or stops displaying them completly. I also cannot forward them in that state or open or delete them in any other way. The only way to get it working again is to quit Netscape, exit quickstart and restart Netscape again.
It just hangs on a bunch of messages or all of them.
The user notices it like this: There are three windows displayed in netscape mail:
- imap folder view
- message list of the current folder and
- the currently displayed message.
The Folder view and Message List in Netscape is always fine, so the Subject and sender, time, etc is always displayed in the List. The problem occurs then on some messages when i select them for reading. The Message Display below the message list just stays empty (also opening the message in a new window doesn't help) or the "title bar in the Message Display" stays empty (no subject, sender, time etc) and the raw email starting with header, raw html email and encoded attachment is shown below, each line followed by another blank line, like this:
== start corrupted email X-UIDL: 8793f170f0430909
Return-Path: <frank.xx@xx.de>
Delivered-To: xx@mdn.de
Received: from mailrelay1.xx.de (mailrelay.xx.de [212.114.153.xx])
by xx.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id D31B7A88F
for <xx@mdn.de>; Wed, 18 Jun 2003 08:55:07 +0200 (CEST)Received: from ntmail1.xx.de (ntmail1.xx.de [212.114.155.xx])
html and stuff following...
== end corrupted email
One could read it, but its realy ugly.
It seems, that if i delete a lot of messages in sequence (the morning spam), i can force to happen that problem earlier. It always hangs while deleting my spam.
I like dovecot a lot, it was easy to install etc and works pretty fine except that it still seems to be in beta-stage. Now i would switch to courier/uw-imap until dovecot is ready, but the mbox format dovecot is using seems to be pretty uniq? I think, the users could keep their /var/mail/Username-INBOX, but wouldn't they loose their email folders? Is there any way to switch the software in a easy way? Or will there be a near future release which will fix that? What about the cvs version?
Thanks for you help!
Best regards