[Dovecot] Why is "UIDVALIDITY changed" fatal?

[Chris Wakelin]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> Pseudo mail caused this one too. I'll have to remember to start testing
> changes with mboxes having it too. Fixed it in 1.0-stable and tests.
> 

That seems better. Thanks for the quick response!

UW-IMAP still prefers to have pseudo-messages for efficiency, but 
doesn't create them if they're missing to prevent problems with some 
mail software that can't cope with it. I guess Dovecot prefers not to 
have them, as it's just as efficient without :)

> But anyway if you have both UW-IMAP/Pine accessing the mbox at the same
> time as Dovecot, there can still be problems with flag changes getting
> lost. With mbox_lazy_writes=no you could get Dovecot to show changes to
> Pine earlier, but Pine doesn't have an option to do the same for
> Dovecot.
> 

I've not been mixing UW and Dovecot on my INBOX, just on the AutoSpam 
folder. However, some of my colleagues who are helping me to test it 
have been switching between the two regularly; e.g. use Dovecot at work 
and UW-IMAP (via webmail) from home.

I'm hoping solving the UIDVALIDITY issue will make the switching back 
and forth from UW to Dovecot transparent for them (at the moment they 
have to open affected folders twice if UW has changed the UIDVALIDITY.)

I've warned them it may not be a good idea to have both servers 
accessing the same mailbox at the same time. (BTW is it OK to have two 
versions of Dovecot accessing it at the same time, e.g. 1.0-stable and 
1.0-test68? I've assumed not!)

> Those UID errors sound a bit troubling.. Hopefully they were fixed with
> this change. I don't think it should happen even if there's lots of
> mixed Dovecot/Pine/UW users accessing the same mbox..

They seemed to go away, so perhaps it was a transient thing.

Best Wishes,
Chris

-- 
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Christopher Wakelin,                           c.d.wakelin at reading.ac.uk
IT Services Centre, The University of Reading,  Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439
Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK              Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094