[Dovecot] Mail disappearing

[Paul Tansom]

Obantec Support wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: <bclements at io-networks.com>
> To: <dovecot at dovecot.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2005 8:23 PM
> Subject: [Dovecot] Mail disappearing
> 
>>My users are complaining that their mail is dissappearing out of folders
> or if
>>they go into a folder, the mail will be there one minute, the next it
> isn't.
> 
>>Anybody see this before...and if so..is there a fix?
>>
>>I'm running dovecot 99.11
>>
> Hi
>
> Yes a user reported this tonight. 30MB of emails gone! not happy and wants
> me to restore from backup. ( i had to explain we only backup website
data).
>
> running FC3 with 0.99 but a test of 1.0 stable is on the cards.
>
> all i want is a stable pop3 server like i had on RH8.0
>
> Mark

Please don't scare the wotsits out of me, I've just abandoned Courier
IMAP for two reasons:

1) it seems incapable of handling subfolders anywhere but below the
Inbox and the only help suggested is that I should ask the people
writing my mail client to fix it - so that covers Microsoft (x2),
Mozilla (x2), Eudora, Evolution and Squirrel mail for starters!

2) this is the relevant one here - I kept loosing mail within my IMAP
folders. I don't know whether this one may be relevant here, but the
issue was basically a visibility thing. If I accessed the folders
directly from Mutt on the server all the mail was all there. If I used a
mail client then the mail would not be there. Once in a while a folder
would show up some mail, but others would not see it, and once I'd hit
one of these the only folder that would update properly was the Inbox
until I restarted. Admittedly this was not mail dissappearing, simply
not appearing in the first place, but I thought I'd mention it in case
the description prompted someone to have a bright idea about what would
be causing the reference problems in Dovecot :) From what I could see
the client and server just stopped talking to each other. I certainly
got no error messages logged. I'm using Thunderbird at the moment, and I
think the problem was primarily in the two Mozilla based mail clients,
and Outlook (+ Express). I seem to recall Evolution being OK, but sadly
Evolution is deceased on my system and I've not worked out whether this
is my own problem or a Debian issue yet.

As an aside, I've been very pleased with Dovecot so far, especially
having spent so long trying to get Courier working properly. So far I
have Exim 4 working with it and Procmail. My next stage of mail upgrade
is to rebuild my filtering with Mailscanner, Spamassassing and ClamAV as
well as hooking up IMP for webmail. I also need to build in virtual user
support with probably an LDAP backend. By then I hope there'll be a
version in Debian Backports for shared folders ;) I may hold off a bit
on this though.

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/