Joelly Alexander put forth on 5/14/2010 2:18 PM:
hi,
dovecot from the debian lenny backports does not successfully accept incomming imap or imaps connections; when the client connect i can see the clients ip address in an imap-process but the client cannot succesfully connect and retries this several times where an new imap-process is bound until the maximum connections per client is reached; when the client is closed the imap-processes on the server stay opened, even when dovecot will be restarted or stopped - the processes needs to killed manually;
I'm running the 1.2.11 Lenny backport as well and I've never seen the problem you describe. I'm using a custom rolled 2.6.32.9 from kernel.org source. I'm not using iptables or selinux. I've been troubleshooting some performance issues likely related to mbox processing/indexing but I've had nothing like the problem you describe. I'm using Unix user accounts and PAM authentication instead of virtual users, so there are substantial differences between our setups.
However, I don't think Dovecot is the source of your problem. From your description, it seems likely that return packets aren't making it to the clients. This would explain why they keep reconnecting, and would also explain why the imap process is never closed, i.e. the client doesn't think it ever connected successfully, so it never sends a logout command.
Something is preventing your return packets from reaching the clients. Check/disable your local iptables rules and any firewalls/routers between you and the clients to see where the outbound traffic is being blocked.
Package: dovecot-imapd State: installed Automatically installed: no Version: 1:1.2.11-1~bpo50+2 Priority: optional Section: mail Maintainer: Dovecot Maintainers jaldhar-dovecot@debian.org Uncompressed Size: 1823k Architecture: i386 Compressed Size: 1119k Filename: pool/main/d/dovecot/dovecot-imapd_1.2.11-1~bpo50+2_i386.deb MD5sum: fadfa84d8f07163ab7a2e9b32e39e056 Archive: lenny-backports, now
-- Stan