I resolved this issue by deleting some messages from my Junk mailbox which had Date headers long in the past and future, despite being very old. It appears to me that expire-tool quit when a message had a Date header forged to be non-expired, despite the message being old enough to have been expired. A bug in expire-tool?

• Alex Reinhart

On Apr 15, 2011, at 3:15 PM, Alex Reinhart wrote:

Hello,

I have dovecot set up with expire-tool to nuke Junk messages greater than 30 days old. On a server with many user accounts, it seems to work on most of them.

However, on my user account, expire-tool skips my Junk folder entirely, despite it containing messages from January of this year. Here is the expire-tool --test output:

Info: alex@scienceforums.net/Junk: timestamp 1284027481 (Thu Sep 9 05:18:01 2010) -> 1304023056 (Thu Apr 28 15:37:36 2011)

Then it skips to the next mailbox. (Note that I intentionally set the timestamp back to force it to consider my mailbox.) I don't understand why it doesn't want to expunge my 2700 junk messages when it will expunge several thousand in other accounts happily. The expire plugin has been enabled for probably over a year, so all of the messages should be tracked.

My only hypothesis is that it has something to do with variables in the mail_location; however, mail_location should be overridden by a user_query, though that contains variables too. Would this account for the issue? It seems unlikely, since other users on the server work just fine.

dovecot -n output for the interested:

# 1.2.9: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf # OS: Linux 2.6.32-24-server x86_64 Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS ext3 base_dir: /var/run/dovecot/ log_timestamp: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S protocols: managesieve imaps pop3s listen(default): *:143 listen(imap): *:143 listen(pop3): *:110 listen(managesieve): * ssl_listen(default): *:993 ssl_listen(imap): *:993 ssl_listen(pop3): *:995 ssl_listen(managesieve): login_dir: /var/run/dovecot//login login_executable(default): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(imap): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(pop3): /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3-login login_executable(managesieve): /usr/lib/dovecot/managesieve-login first_valid_uid: 150 last_valid_uid: 150 mail_privileged_group: mail mail_location: maildir:/var/vmail/%d/%u mbox_write_locks: fcntl dotlock mail_executable(default): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap mail_executable(imap): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap mail_executable(pop3): /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3 mail_executable(managesieve): /usr/lib/dovecot/managesieve mail_plugins(default): quota imap_quota expire mail_plugins(imap): quota imap_quota expire mail_plugins(pop3): quota expire mail_plugins(managesieve): mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/imap mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/imap mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/pop3 mail_plugin_dir(managesieve): /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/managesieve lda: mail_plugins: quota sieve expire postmaster_address: postmaster@xyloid.org sendmail_path: /usr/lib/sendmail auth_socket_path: /var/run/dovecot/auth-master sieve_global_path: /etc/dovecot/sieve.global auth default: user: nobody passdb: driver: sql args: /etc/dovecot/dovecot-sql.conf userdb: driver: sql args: /etc/dovecot/dovecot-sql.conf socket: type: listen client: path: /var/spool/postfix/private/auth mode: 432 user: postfix group: postfix master: path: /var/run/dovecot/auth-master mode: 432 user: vmail group: mail plugin: quota: dict:user::proxy::quotadict quota_rule: *:storage=1G quota_rule2: Trash:storage=10%% quota_rule3: Junk:ignore sieve: /var/vmail/%d/%n/dovecot.sieve expire: Trash 7 Trash/* 7 Junk 30 expire_dict: proxy::expire dict: quotadict: mysql:/etc/dovecot/dovecot-dict-quota.conf expire: mysql:/etc/dovecot/dovecot-dict-expire.conf

And dovecot-dict-expire.conf:

connect = host=localhost dbname=mail user=mail password=[password]

map { pattern = shared/expire/$user/$mailbox table = expires value_field = expire_stamp

fields { username = $user mailbox = $mailbox } }

Thanks.

• Alex Reinhart