You had to ask that...we're still on 0.99, but we're testing other options as well. We're pretty restricted to RHEL 4.x, but with the help of others on the list we've made some progress with testing 1.0.7 on 4.x as well. We have some clients using a java based IMAP application with some major issues, so we're moving slow on changing our config for one bad application. We've seen this issue and others, and Red Hat says they're recommending dotlock to increase stability of the mboxes for the short-term:

-> fcntl() failed with mbox file /var/mail/XXX: Resource deadlock avoided -> file istream.c: line 93 (i_stream_set_read_limit): assertion failed: (stream->v_size == 0 || v_offset <= stream->v_size) -> Corrupted modify log file /users/XXX/mail/.imap/INBOX/.imap.index.log.2: Contains more data than expected -> Error rewriting mbox file /users/XXX/mail/Folder Name: Unexpected end of file

-----Original Message----- From: dovecot-bounces+joallesi=cisco.com@dovecot.org [mailto:dovecot-bounces+joallesi=cisco.com@dovecot.org] On Behalf Of Charles Marcus Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 6:34 PM To: Dovecot Mailing List Subject: Re: [Dovecot] locking strategies?

On 11/30/2007 Joe Allesi -X (joallesi - Coyote Creek Consulting at Cisco) wrote:

Any known issues with these locking strategies? (RHEL 4.x default)

Which version of dovecot?

At 7:04 PM -0500 11/30/07, Joe Allesi -X (joallesi - Coyote Creek Consulting at Cisco) wrote:

You had to ask that...we're still on 0.99,

I'm not sure that holding to a strategy of "Embracing 0.99" is a wise decision to admit to in a public forum under your own name or in any way traceable to an employer or client, but maybe you have missed the subtext of the responses to your post on that choice and to others who have asked for 0.99 help over the past year or so. Maybe a more explicit warning will help...

You are running a forked distribution derived from a version of Dovecot which is known to have bugs that can cause mailbox corruption. You probably cannot configure avoidance of all of the destructive issues in 0.99. It seems likely that using dotlocking will reduce the odds of running into some 0.99 bugs, but it is not rational to expect that you can avoid all of the risks with using 0.99 by configuring it in some particular manner. You cannot even adequately understand all of the risks given the migration of most other users of that software over the past few years to later versions. RedHat forked the distribution they support for RHEL4 over three years ago, before the last 3 releases of Dovecot 0.99.x and before any 1.x release.

Another way to look at this is that you are not actually running the "real" Dovecot, but rather a different thing forked by RedHat from a codebase that was significantly different from today's Dovecot. It might actually have all of the 0.99.11 bugs fixed, but if that's the case then they have been fixed by RedHat for their customers, and you might be making the right choice. In the alternate reality where using the latest RH-supported release of Dovecot 0.99 is not a laughably incompetent and irresponsible choice, you should be looking for support to RedHat, not to the user community or developer of the real Dovecot.

-- Bill Cole bill@scconsult.com