On Mon, 2004-08-23 at 08:48 +0100, Mark Lidstone wrote:
Is it supposed to give the current time and date in the error message. I've no problem with it giving an "internal error" message to the client, but I am a little confused about the time being in there. That's all I'm asking about.
Client should never see any "real" error messages to make sure no extra information about the system gets leaked. So any time something unexpected happens, Dovecot gives the "internal error" message to user while writing the real error to log file.
The timestamp is there to help sysadmin find the real error message from log files when user gives a copy&pasted internal error message. Instead of timestamp I guess there could be also some unique identifier which could be grepped from logs but I think timestamp is better.
And about the original problem of giving "internal error" when Dovecot process didn't have access to some maildir.. Maybe it could have replied "Permission denied" to client in that case. It already does in several cases, but I guess the problem here was that it was trying to create the missing dirs but couldn't. I'll look over all these permission issues properly when creating real shared folder support.