Well, the good news is this didn't end up being a dovecot or NetApp issue. RHEL 6.2 has a kernel bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=770250
Solution is to upgrade to the latest kernel released on 5/15:
kernel-2.6.32-220.17.1.el6
We no longer get this error after the update. Thanks for taking a look!
- Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi [2012-05-17 00:35:49 +0300]:
On 17.5.2012, at 0.20, Tom Pawlowski wrote:
dovecot: imap(user1): Error: readdir(/u1/user1/Maildir/.AUTO-DELETED-SPAM/new) failed: Too many levels of symbolic links .. Create a new folder using alpine, save anywhere from 1000 to 10000 identical emails to the new folder.
Change to that new folder, thus prompting the move from new to cur. The client receives the message and aborts the opening. Anywhere from 400-520 files are successfully moved each time. It takes numerous attempts to finally move all the files over--which I suspect some IMAP clients do, hence the inconsistent errors in production.
See if the attached patch makes any difference?
I'm leaning towards some sort of bug on the NFS client level, as Timo
What NFS server are you using? Perhaps it's related to that.
-- Tom Pawlowski OIT-CSS System Administrator office: Hill 145 email: tompru@jla.rutgers.edu phone: (732) 445-2634