On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 13:25 +0300, Timo Neuvonen wrote:
I've met a couple of times a situation, that there is something wrong with the mail server's operating system / file system, but Dovecot is still working, although it cannot any more access the mailbox files. .. So, is there currently a way to configure Dovecot in a way it would recognize that the mailbox actually is not accessible, and in that case it would return an error message to the mail client instead of returning "empty mailbox"? Of course, a smart enough mail client might also ask something from the user, but that seems not be the case either...
How would Dovecot figure out if the mailbox isn't accessible because of some filesystem error, or because it's simply a new user who doesn't yet have a mailbox?
If any system calls return eg. EIO errors Dovecot catches those and fail with internal error messages. So I guess in your case everything seemed to work, but the mail directories just were lost. I can't think of how Dovecot could in a generic way detect that this is the case.
If this behavious cannot be changed with the current configuration options, then a kind feature request to the developer: Would it be possible to change the behaviour of Dovecot when it actually can not access the mailbox files?
Change mail_executable to point to a script:
#!/bin/sh
if [ ! -f ~/mail ]; then echo "* BAD mails are lost, bye" exit 0 fi exec /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap