On 21 Apr 2021, at 11:31, Michael Grant mgrant@grant.org wrote:
We don't really fix issues with mbox files anymore, other than read issues.. Our focus is enabling people to move to other formats, such as maildir. I would strongly recommend you to consider using maildir instead of mbox.
Ugh, so many people still have their mail in mbox that I find it hard to believe this is "deprecated".
It's a terrible format and was developed when most people had mail that maybe took up several kilobytes of space.
I would also recommend you use dovecot-lda in procmail to deliver mail, if you are not already doing so.
I wasn't, so it took me a couple days to try this and wait for it to happen again. It's still happening. I therefore think this probably doesn't have anything todo with procmail.
Procmail is old, creaky, has several known bugs, and is unmaintained. But also works perfectly well with Maildir, a vast improvement over mbox.
You'll get a lot of pushback if you do this! I'm not the only one using it.
Yeah, stirring gigabytes of mail in a single flat text file is a fantastic idea, I can see why some people are so hesitant to give it up.
Honestly, it's bad. Don't use it.
mailx and the gnu mail tools use it and I don't know if I can so easily migrate things to maildir format.
GNU Mail certainly can. You will be hard pressed to find a mail client that doesn't. (I've never used mail, but I would be surprised if it was mbox only). From the command line I only use mutt anymore.
I think it could be a nightmare migrating to maildir.
It is not. In fact, it is a facility that is basically built in to formail (that's procmail's formail) which I think is in the formail man page (But it's been a few years since I stopped using procmail). There is also a mb2md.py utility.
https://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/MailFormat
I seem to be or may be the only one on this server seeing the issue. I am also a heavy imap user.
mbox and IMAP together are a big bag of hurt. I switched from mbox back around 2000 specifically because of moving too IMAP.
Is there any way 2 separate IMAP clients talking to dovecot could cause this?
With mbox files? I would sure think so. You have two processes potentially accessing the same file. That is never good.
I'm really hoping that this is just some config issue.
It is, just not the config issue you think it is.
-- WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN --Feet of Clay