Version Info: FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE #0 r266046 AMD64, Dovecot 2.2.13, dovecot-pigeonhole-0.4.3, amavisd-new-2.8.0_2,1, clamav-0.98.4, postfix29-2.9.9_1,1, postfixadmin-2.3.6, spamassassin-3.4.0_12 (zpool data and output of dovecot -n at bottom of post)
I suspect these are related problems and further that they are related to some trivial newb error I've made in my configuration, but searching descriptions of the symptoms has not yet guided me to a solution.
I recently migrated from Courier to Dovecot on new hardware and imap synced a 16GB mailstore (du -hs) divided up into annual directories with about 15,000 messages each. I mention the size because it seems an errant Remove Duplicate Messages (Alternate) 0.3.9 acting on what seem to be false duplicates in Thunderbird reduced the inbox size from 7500-ish messages to 1300 (DOH!) and may have solved my K-9 problem described below. My old Courier server still has the vast majority of these messages and I will resync someday and then try to file them away more expediently than my previously somewhat lazy management style to keep the inbox small.
In thunderbird, I get constant downloading of messages. Every time I switch to the inbox from another folder, the messages start redownloading. This sometimes, but not always, seems to create duplicate messages, but I'm now fairly sure they are only created in the client and not on the server. Searching through various forums, it appears this has been a problem for Thunderbird for some time, but it wasn't for me on Courier. As posts about similar errors seem to have petered out over the last year without any clear guidance on how to fix it that I could find, I expect there's a simple fix I just haven't found yet, either in TB configuration or in Dovecot. Any hints? I tried Thunderfix to remove the .msf files and will be redownloading my mail over the thin pipe out to Iraq for the next 6 months (DOH!). One artifact is that when I restart thunderbird, my inbox is reported as having about 130 messages in it, then thunderbird starts redownloading headers and eventually gets back up to the 1297 currently listed both in the TB pane and by ls | wc -l in /cur. Is it possible there is a time out that needs to be extended? In TB, I've set (among other less apparently relevant options) mailnews.tcptimeout;1000 mail.db.idle_limit;30000000
Also, with Thunderbird, I get duplication of messages in the client. I suspect this is related to the previous redownload error, but there is some indication in some posts that it is potentially related to a dirty flag. I've had this problem before with Thunderbird and Courier, but it went away after a TB update. It seems to have reappeared with Dovecot. The TB client hasn't been updated during the transition, so some interaction issue seems more likely than a pure TB bug. Likely TB's fault as this is a well known, but poorly diagnosed TB issue (deleting duplicates regularly seems to be the solution, but my inbox would double in size every few hours on the LAN. Now that I'm remote over a 2mbps link, it has slowed way down: bonus!).
"Expunged message reappeared, giving a new UID" errors appear a lot. This might well be related to the last error. This seems to happen with TB client connections, but I'm not sure what action triggers it. I am not replicating. I tried renaming 10-director.conf to 10-director.conf.disabled and got no complaints from Dovecot (as I'm not using replication, it shouldn't) but that indicates that this Expunged message reappeared error is probably of a different source than, for example, Simon Fraser's debug effort.
K9 was only showing a subset of my messages and generally not the new ones. They'd appear in the alert properly, but weren't visible in the client and sometimes they'd be visible and then disappear later. I imagined there could a correlation between TB checking mail and perhaps moving messages from /new to /cur and K9 losing track, but the potentially tragic "duplicate" removal may have reduced my inbox to a size that k9 can handle as K9 inbox display seems normal now as far as I can tell. When I resync (assuming I can), I sort of dread this problem reappearing. K9 worked as expected against Courier with the same inbox.
These apparently difficult to diagnose problems are occasionally suggested as related to namespace configuration issues and thunderbird is reported to have issues with some separator options. I vaguely suspect this, but I'm pretty sure my namespace config is default and should be well tested. I haven't, for example, explicitly stated the default "/" but left it commented out. I increased the connection limit count per user*IP to 20 as TB seems to be parallel downloading a lot of folders. This has neither improved nor degraded performance in any way I can see and is probably irrelevant.
Any hints greatly appreciated.
Filesystem/Zpool data: NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE zroot size 400G - zroot capacity 28% - zroot altroot - default zroot health ONLINE - zroot guid 1061309925223582150 default zroot version - default zroot bootfs zroot local zroot delegation on default zroot autoreplace off default zroot cachefile - default zroot failmode wait default zroot listsnapshots off default zroot autoexpand off default zroot dedupditto 0 default zroot dedupratio 1.10x - zroot free 286G - zroot allocated 114G - zroot readonly off - zroot comment - default zroot expandsize 0 - zroot freeing 0 default zroot feature@async_destroy enabled local zroot feature@empty_bpobj active local zroot feature@lz4_compress active local
server # dovecot -n # 2.2.13: /usr/local/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf # OS: FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE amd64 auth_default_realm = mydomain.com auth_mechanisms = plain login auth_realms = mydomain.com mydomain2.org disable_plaintext_auth = no first_valid_gid = 5000 first_valid_uid = 5000 hostname = mydomain.com imap_client_workarounds = tb-extra-mailbox-sep tb-lsub-flags imap_idle_notify_interval = 29 mins last_valid_gid = 5000 last_valid_uid = 5000 lda_mailbox_autocreate = yes listen = * mail_gid = 5000 mail_location = maildir:~/:CONTROL=/var/no-quota/%u mail_plugins = quota mail_log notify mail_temp_dir = /var/tmp mail_uid = 5000 maildir_broken_filename_sizes = yes managesieve_notify_capability = mailto managesieve_sieve_capability = fileinto reject envelope encoded-character vacation subaddress comparator-i;ascii-numeric relational regex imap4flags copy include variables body enotify environment mailbox date ihave duplicate spamtest spamtestplus editheader mbox_lazy_writes = no namespace inbox { inbox = yes location = mailbox Drafts { special_use = \Drafts } mailbox Junk { special_use = \Junk } mailbox Sent { special_use = \Sent } mailbox "Sent Messages" { special_use = \Sent } mailbox Trash { special_use = \Trash } prefix = } passdb { args = /usr/local/etc/dovecot/dovecot-sql.conf.ext driver = sql } plugin { expire = Trash mail_log_events = delete undelete expunge copy mailbox_delete mailbox_rename mail_log_fields = uid box msgid size quota = maildir:User quota quota_exceeded_message = Storage quota for this account has been exceeded, please try again later. quota_rule = *:storage=50G quota_rule2 = Trash:storage=+30%% quota_rule3 = Sent:storage=+30%% quota_warning = storage=90%% quota-warning 90 %u quota_warning2 = storage=75%% quota-warning 75 %u sieve = ~/.dovecot.sieve sieve_before = /usr/local/etc/dovecot/sieve/ sieve_dir = ~/sieve sieve_extensions = +spamtest +spamtestplus +relational +comparator-i;ascii-numeric +editheader } postmaster_address = gessel@mydomain.com protocols = imap lmtp sieve sieve sendmail_path = /usr/local/sbin/sendmail service auth { unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth { group = postfix mode = 0666 user = postfix } unix_listener auth-userdb { group = vmail mode = 0600 user = vmail } } service managesieve-login { inet_listener sieve { port = 4190 } service_count = 1 vsz_limit = 128 M } service quota-warning { executable = script /usr/local/bin/quota-warning.sh unix_listener quota-warning { user = vmail } user = vmail } ssl = required ssl_cert =