B. Johannessen put forth on 5/11/2010 1:31 AM:

On 11/05/10 04:06, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

...

It would be nice if there was a short heads up regarding this in the dovecot wiki postfix LDA and/or sieve sections. I'll mention this on postfix-user as well.

From http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA:

"Note that Postfix's mailbox_size_limit setting applies to all files that are written to. So if you have a limit of 50 MB, deliver can't write to log files larger than 50 MB and you'll start getting temporary failures."

No wonder I didn't find it. It's buried in the "logging" section of the main LDA page instead of the Postfix section, where one would assume to find _Postfix specific_ LDA information.

Timo, any chance we could get this text moved into an appropriate place on the Postfix LDA page where it belongs? I'm sure it would be very helpful to future Postfix/LDA/mbox users. And also add the error message they'll see in the logs when they run into this problem, something like:

Jan 1 00:00:00 hostname dovecot: deliver(user): write() failed with mbox file /home/user/mail/foo: File too large

Thanks for pointing this out Bob.

-- Stan

Patrick Nagel put forth on 5/11/2010 10:45 PM:

It's a Wiki, why don't you just change it? :)

I assumed it was limited access--never thought to try. Making changes now...

Done.

-- Stan

Charles Marcus put forth on 5/11/2010 7:53 AM:

On 2010-05-10 10:06 PM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

...

I set it to zero and that fixed the problem. This is indeed one strange situation. The error was reported in the log by dovecot, but the setting that fixes the problem is actually in Postfix. It would be nice if there was a short heads up regarding this in the dovecot wiki postfix LDA and/or sieve sections. I'll mention this on postfix-user as well.

Bob already pointed you to the wiki entry,

You're reading messages out of order Charles. Bob didn't post his message until 4.5 hours _after_ I'd already solved the problem and posted what you quote above.

but it was also *telling* you to look in the server (postfix) logs, where the error is most likely much clearer:

...

May 10 17:45:04 greer dovecot: deliver(stan): sieve: msgid=20100510224422.GA4293@heima.gjk.dk: failed to store into mailbox '1-Debian-Users': Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information. [2010-05-10 17:45:04]

:)

Charles, first off, that _IS_ the "server" log you're looking at, from both mail.err and mail.log. Second, Postfix doesn't log _anything_ relating this error. That is the entirety of this problem. I made that abundantly clear in my previous two emails on this subject. The fact that Postfix doesn't log anything, but that LDA does log it on behalf of Postfix, but _without telling the OP this is the case_, makes standard troubleshooting procedure useless.

Postfix generates the error condition but Dovecot LDA reports it. _This should be fixed_. If Postfix generates the error it should be Postfix stamping the log with the error, not Dovecot. If for some reason changing it so that Postfix logs the error is difficult or can't be done, then at the very least Dovecot should add information to the logged error telling the OP to troubleshoot in the direction of Postfix, _not_ Dovecot. From all I've found to this point, this situation _ONLY_ occurs with Postfix. So log it that way for $deity's sake. Anyway...

I used the Dovecot Wiki search function to find the error message and it returned nothing, zilch: http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA?action=fullsearch&context=180&value=write%28%29+failed+with+mbox+file&titlesearch=Titles

I then reread the Postfix/LDA section of the wiki and found nothing. I then turned to Google and found the answer via a couple of archived list/forum posts a couple of years old from OPs that ran into the same situation I did. Thank $deity for Google. The posts I found were to neither this list nor the Postfix list. IIRC they were on Linux distro list archives, CentOS maybe.

Most people managing computer systems are logical thinkers. If we weren't, we'd be doing something else for a living. It's _not_ logical to:

1. Have one software report errors on behalf of another software
2. Then give no clue that this is what's happening in the log
3. Have the documentation of the issue buried in an illogical location

I took all the logical steps to troubleshoot and resolve this. My efforts were thwarted by:

1. An illogical error reporting mechanism
2. Documentation located in an illogical place

Charles, you make it sound as if I'm some nitwit of an OP who can't read logs properly. I hope you now understand that the problem is the opposite. The problem was my thorough, _logical_ reading of the logs. The logs said look at Dovecot LDA, but the problem was Postfix.

In closing, there are currently _5_ MTA specific subsections of the LDA wiki. The documentation describing this _Postfix specific_ issue is in the main LDA page under "Logging". There is no other MTA specific information in the "Logging" section but for Postfix. This information belongs in the Postfix section. In addition, Deovecot needs to add additional text to the error message sent to the log somehow identifying that the error is related to Postfix.

-- Stan