[Dovecot] Messages not expunged
Hi all,
I'm doing some testing between U of Washington IMAP server (which we currently run) and Dovecot on a IBM AIX system. I created a 50M mailbox, made up of 262 msgs. I'm using a Perl Script with the imap::client module to fetch each message and then flag it for deletion. At the end of the test, I run an expunge to delete all the messages.
UofW imap server ran fine, messages gone. With dovecot I found the messages were not being expunged. The log indicated they were, but then said 262 messages existed at the end. After more checking, I found the file system I was using was low on disk space (<50M). As soon as I added more disk space, and reran the test with dovecot the messages were indeed expunged.
Is this normal imap protocol behavior? I thought I would see an error message or something in the dovecot log. Does dovecot duplicate the mailbox before expunge? There wasn't room on our system to do that.
Thanks much for any insights/info.
Jackie
Jackie Hunt
ACNS Voice: (970) 663-3789
Colorado State University FAX: (970) 491-1958
Fort Collins, CO 80523 Email: jackie.hunt@colostate.edu
On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 10:48 -0600, Jackie Hunt wrote:
UofW imap server ran fine, messages gone. With dovecot I found the messages were not being expunged. The log indicated they were, but then said 262 messages existed at the end. After more checking, I found the file system I was using was low on disk space (<50M). As soon as I added more disk space, and reran the test with dovecot the messages were indeed expunged.
Is this normal imap protocol behavior? I thought I would see an error message or something in the dovecot log. Does dovecot duplicate the mailbox before expunge? There wasn't room on our system to do that.
No, there's no duplication and it should have given an error if it couldn't delete the mails, unless it thought that they already were expunged. Did you test with mbox or maildir? I'd guess there's some syncing problem.
Getting an imap process strace of the whole operation could be useful too.
On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 10:48 -0600, Jackie Hunt wrote:
UofW imap server ran fine, messages gone. With dovecot I found the messages were not being expunged. The log indicated they were, but then said 262 messages existed at the end. After more checking, I found the file system I was using was low on disk space (<50M). As soon as I added more disk space, and reran the test with dovecot the messages were indeed expunged. =20 Is this normal imap protocol behavior? I thought I would see an error message or something in the dovecot log. Does dovecot duplicate the mailbox before expunge? There wasn't room on our system to do that.
No, there's no duplication and it should have given an error if it couldn't delete the mails, unless it thought that they already were expunged. Did you test with mbox or maildir? I'd guess there's some syncing problem.
Thank, Timo. I found my error. I was recreating the mailbox before each test run, but I wasn't deleting the index files used by dovecot. Once I added that to my test, messages are expunged properly by dovecot.
I looked again at the log and saw:
dovecot: Aug 25 10:52:52 Error: IMAP(lib): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /home/lib/mail/BigBox (525 > 1, seq=1, idx_msgs=260) dovecot: Aug 25 10:56:33 Error: IMAP(lib): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /home/lib/mail/BigBox (787 > 1, seq=1, idx_msgs=262)
which sounds like the syncing problem you referred to.
Is there any documentation about the index files used by dovecot? For testing purposes, I'm curious about when they are rebuilt (on a SELECT of a mailbox?) If we do have an issue is the best course of action to delete/move them and have dovecot recreate them?
Thanks much!
Jackie
Jackie Hunt
ACNS Voice: (970) 663-3789
Colorado State University FAX: (970) 491-1958
Fort Collins, CO 80523 Email: jackie.hunt@colostate.edu
On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 10:51 -0600, Jackie Hunt wrote:
Is there any documentation about the index files used by dovecot? For testing purposes, I'm curious about when they are rebuilt (on a SELECT of a mailbox?)
A bit late reply, but the index files are updated whenever Dovecot notices that the mailbox has changed. Usually it happens after every command.
Also "updated" is more correct term for it than "rebuilt".
If we do have an issue is the best course of action to delete/move them and have dovecot recreate them?
Yep.
participants (2)
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Jackie Hunt
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Timo Sirainen