On 17.10.2012, at 2.18, Daniel Parthey wrote:

doveadm -c /etc/dovecot-director/dovecot-director.conf -D purge -A shows the following message in the log when iterating the 49th user:

Oct 17 00:47:17 10.129.3.233 dovecot: doveadm: Error: purge: invalid option -- 'e' Oct 17 00:47:17 10.129.3.233 dovecot: doveadm(someuser@example-ll.org): Error: doveadm purge: Client sent unknown parameter: ?

Any ideas on how this error gets triggered?

Not sure. There's no valid 'e' option anywhere. I guess one of the non-option parameters begin with "-e" and it think it's an option. But I can't really think of how that would happen with purge either. So it would be helpful to look at what exactly the doveadms are talking to each others. Could you get the network traffic from them? Or strace -s 1000 doveadm purge should show it somewhere too.