For the last four weeks or so, I have been getting very occasional reports of "stuck" messages from three users of my mail server. When this occurs, Thunderbird's status display in the bottom left will alternate rapidly between "Opening folder" and "Checking mail server capabilities", and will never display the message.
I'm not sure if this is something which crept into a recent release of Dovecot, or a problem with T'bird, or something else entirely. I had suspected corrupt messages the first time or two, and was once able to copy such a message into my own "Maildir/cur" directory and have it fail for me. Since then I've not been able to replicate this feat. I also thought that it might have been the Dovecot indices becoming corrupt but today I tried purging them for an affected user, and the problem still showed up. In addition, for the first time today that user reported a message which originally (as of 6 Nov. 2008) worked fine but today demonstrates the issue.
If anyone has seen anything like this or has suggestions to try, please let me know. If necessary I can go to full debug-logging with Dovecot but I'd prefer to avoid that if possible :)
Thanks, Allen
-- Allen Belletti allen@isye.gatech.edu 404-894-6221 Phone Industrial and Systems Engineering 404-385-2988 Fax Georgia Institute of Technology