[Dovecot] imap sent-mail folder sometimes dosen't get updated when used by more than a mailer at the same time.
Hi, I'm collecting users feedback of latest dovecot 1.1.rc3 development release.
Some users are complaining that their sent mails sometimes don't get written to imap Sent-mail folder.
It seems that all these users were using multiple istances of imap processes to read their mail (thunderbird+horde-imp, evolution+horde-imp or multiple thunderbird istances).
No error message is written in dovecot.log, no user feedback in horde-imp/evolution. Only thunderbird says it can't update Sent folder.
Has anyone had similar issues?
Diego.
On 3/12/2008 1:59 PM, Diego Liziero wrote:
Hi, I'm collecting users feedback of latest dovecot 1.1.rc3 development release.
Some users are complaining that their sent mails sometimes don't get written to imap Sent-mail folder.
It seems that all these users were using multiple istances of imap processes to read their mail (thunderbird+horde-imp, evolution+horde-imp or multiple thunderbird istances).
No error message is written in dovecot.log, no user feedback in horde-imp/evolution. Only thunderbird says it can't update Sent folder.
Has anyone had similar issues?
Yes... I don't believe this is a dovecot issue, as this is an occasional issue with Thunderbird I've seen on both dovecot and Courier-imap (in fact it seems to happen more often on the sites that use Courier)...
The only way I've ever been able to fix it is to simply restart Thunderbird - but you have to make sure that all TBird processes are 'dead' - in Windows I often have to kill a rogue process to fix this problem.
--
Best regards,
Charles
Diego Liziero wrote:
Hi, I'm collecting users feedback of latest dovecot 1.1.rc3 development release.
Some users are complaining that their sent mails sometimes don't get written to imap Sent-mail folder.
I'm having that exact trouble with Usermin as I just posted a follow up to an old issue. See subject:
Re: [Dovecot] IMAP storage - mail_location =
maildir:~/Maildir:mbox:~/mail/
I'm using dovecot 1.0.10. However when using thunderbird, I do not see this problem.
It seems that all these users were using multiple istances of imap processes to read their mail (thunderbird+horde-imp, evolution+horde-imp or multiple thunderbird istances).
Being my first experience using/configuring IMAP server, I'm finding that using multiple clients at the same time, changes are not immediately posted so viewing the same account with thunderbird on one machine and outlook on another, it appears to get out of sync. Seems mostly the 'delete' or 'move' commands don't actually happen until the client program is closed. I'm finding this annoying personally, but it seems to be the way it is supposed to work?
No error message is written in dovecot.log, no user feedback in horde-imp/evolution. Only thunderbird says it can't update Sent folder.
Has anyone had similar issues?
Diego.
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Diego Liziero diegoliz@gmail.com wrote:
Has anyone had similar issues?
Charles Marcus wrote:
Yes... I don't believe this is a dovecot issue, as this is an occasional issue with Thunderbird I've seen on both dovecot and Courier-imap (in fact it seems to happen more often on the sites that use Courier)... [..]
The fact is that with wu-imap none complained about missing sent mails, we just switced last week to dovecot (mainly because of really bad performance of wu-imap) and several users started complaining about this issue.
Another (maybe related?) strange thing is that local mail (sent by sendmail) sometimes get delayed to the following queue run (that was set to 30 min). Even this fact never happened before the switch to dovecot.
I thought it could be caused by a bad locking configuration, but Centos5 sendmail should use fcntl, wu-imap should have used it as well (am I wrong?), and dovecot is explicitly configured with fcntl, too.
Perhaps, as it never happened with wu-imap, it could be fixed with dovecot, too.
The hard part is to understand why it happens.
Regards, Diego.
On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Diego Liziero wrote:
Perhaps, as it never happened with wu-imap, it could be fixed with dovecot, too.
The hard part is to understand why it happens.
I wonder if an IMAP trace for a working UW-IMAP setup and the failing Dovecot setup might help.
-- Asheesh.
-- Satire is what closes in New Haven.
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Diego Liziero wrote:
[..] Some users are complaining that their sent mails sometimes don't get written to imap Sent-mail folder.
Tim Alberts wrote:
[..] I'm finding that using multiple clients at the same time, changes are not immediately posted so viewing the same account with thunderbird on one machine and outlook on another, it appears to get out of sync. Seems mostly the 'delete' or 'move' commands don't actually happen until the client program is closed.
Mmm.. the fact I'm reporting is different: you noticed that changes don't appear immediately when using multiple clients because of local caching.
Here it happens that mail isn't actually written to an imap folder (sent mail).
Closing all instances and opening a new one doesn't get the lost mail back.
When it happens with thunderbird, the user gets an error stating that the mail can't be saved. With other mail clients nothing is said and the mail is just lost.
Regards, Diego.
On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 23:39 +0100, Diego Liziero wrote:
When it happens with thunderbird, the user gets an error stating that the mail can't be saved. With other mail clients nothing is said and the mail is just lost.
Enabling rawlog (http://wiki.dovecot.org/Debugging/Rawlog) and looking at what exactly gets sent at that time could be useful.
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 3:36 AM, Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi wrote:
Enabling rawlog (http://wiki.dovecot.org/Debugging/Rawlog) and looking at what exactly gets sent at that time could be useful.
I did it but I could't find anything useful.
Then I decided to use wireshark on the client PC and here is what I found: Mail clients are creating new connections to save sent mail to "Sent" imap folder. At the end of the authentication process the following helpful message is sent to client: "NO Maximum number of connections from user+IP exceeded"
Great. That's why. Our imap server is in dmz and all internal users are reaching this server natted from the same ip.
The fact is that error message doesn't appear in dovecot logs, and email clients don't say anything useful, either. (maybe dovecot should write it to /var/log/dovecot.log)
Increasing mail_max_userip_connections value should fix it.
Thank you all for helping me in solving this issue.
Regards, Diego.
On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 11:35 +0100, Diego Liziero wrote:
Then I decided to use wireshark on the client PC and here is what I found: Mail clients are creating new connections to save sent mail to "Sent" imap folder. At the end of the authentication process the following helpful message is sent to client: "NO Maximum number of connections from user+IP exceeded"
Great. That's why. Our imap server is in dmz and all internal users are reaching this server natted from the same ip.
The fact is that error message doesn't appear in dovecot logs, and email clients don't say anything useful, either. (maybe dovecot should write it to /var/log/dovecot.log)
It is written as a disconnect reason:
dovecot: Mar 13 12:42:41 Info: imap-login: Maximum number of connections from user+IP exceeded: user=<tss>, method=PLAIN, rip=127.0.0.1, lip=127.0.0.1, secured
I thought Thunderbird was using max. 5 connections as default though, so why is this happening? Is it not 5 as default or did your users change it?
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:44 AM, Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi wrote:
It is written as a disconnect reason:
Sorry Timo, you're right, my fault, it was there on info_log among tons of other debug messages, and I was watching the error log.
I thought Thunderbird was using max. 5 connections as default though, so why is this happening? Is it not 5 as default or did your users change it?
The issue happens when multiple instances of the mail client are opened with the same username (and here dovecot sees everyone natted with the same ip).
We have some office mail accounts that are read by more than a user.
I have still to check how many connections are used by horde-imp webmail.
So, again, my fault, and sorry for the noise.
Diego.
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On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Diego Liziero wrote:
When it happens with thunderbird, the user gets an error stating that the mail can't be saved.
Do you have configured a connection limit per user?
Thunderbird tends to use plenty of connections simultaneously, if multiple actions are going on. There was an advice on the Courier list (I used once upon a time) to drop the default of 5 simultaneous connection to three, which worked out better those days.
We have three users accessing the same mail account all time, but I did not hear about this problem with Dovecot v1.0, yet. There is one annoying issue, that Thunderbird updates the state of messages (Read / Answered / Flagged) very slowly.
Very occasioanlly we had problems that Dovecot does not accept new connections at all. Already existing ones work with no visible problem, the dovecot auth process is handling stuff (one can see while tracing it). There had been no signs of this problem for several months now.
Bye,
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participants (6)
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Asheesh Laroia
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Charles Marcus
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Diego Liziero
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Steffen Kaiser
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Tim Alberts
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Timo Sirainen