On Wednesday 02 July 2008 08:52:41 Andre Hübner wrote:
Sometime it happens that 1 user out of x (more than 100) got this standardmessage for ~1 or ~2 thousend times in his mailbox (mbox)
for example:
From MAILER_DAEMON Mon Sep 18 16:16:14 2006
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:16:14 +0200 From: Mail System Internal Data MAILER-DAEMON@myhostname Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA Message-ID: 1158588974@myhostname X-IMAP: 1158588973 0000001177 Status: RO
This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software. If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created with the data reset to initial values.
I've seen messages such as these when using (older versions of) Horde IMP on a Cyrus server in conjunction with Thunderbird and POP3. Not sure how exactly they are created, but I think it had to do with logging in via the IMP web interface, then using Thunderbird, and after that logging in via web interface again.
Dovecot does not use mail messages to store folder meta-data as far as I know so I highly doubt this message was created by Dovecot (does Dovecot even send out messages except when going over quota?). Also notice the date of 2006-09-18, which is almost two years in the past. The message was probably created by some client and was somehow (willingly) ignored or flagged as deleted. Could be that upgrading Dovecot to 1.1 made the message visible again for whatever reason.
Anyway, this is most certainly not a Dovecot-internal message.
Andreas
Andreas Ntaflos Vienna, Austria
GPG Fingerprint: 6234 2E8E 5C81 C6CB E5EC 7E65 397C E2A8 090C A9B4