On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 10:45 -0400, Jeff A. Earickson wrote:
IMAP(user): UIDs broken with partial sync in mbox file /var/mail/user IMAP(user): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /var/mail/user (195 > 34, seq=2, idx_msgs=31)
Although if locking is set wrong, these can happen. Can your users access the mboxes directly or using some other software than Dovecot?
My lock setting is the default (the conf file is #lock_method = fcntl).
lock_method is for Dovecot's indexes. mbox_lock_read and mbox_lock_write are more important. But they default to dotlock + fcntl too.
Yes, users can hit their mailboxes by other means. The IMAP server (dovecot) is also the machine that people can login to interactively. System mailboxes are NFS mounted from the mail server, which people cannot login to. Pine users on IMAP server typically hit their mailbox directly via the NFS mount, but this can be easily changed so they go thru dovecot IMAP. The mail server is also the POP server, running qpopper (I should probably change to dovecot there). People are admonished to use either POP or IMAP but not both.
So you're running lockd too to get fcntl locking working for NFS I guess? Do you know if Pine uses fcntl locks or just dotlocks? Perhaps try adding dotlock to mbox_read_locks as well to see if the problems go away?
The reasons for this setup are historical and security-related. The IMAP and interactive login server has to remain different from the mail/POP server and the NFS mount must remain. Other than that, I am open to suggestions for improvement here. The two things I should do are:
- make pine users go thru IMAP
- change from qpopper POP to dovecot POP on the mail server
Dovecot should work fine with other software, as long as they all use the exact same mbox locking methods.