[Dovecot] Strange POP3 problem...

[Mike Cisar]

I've been having this problem for a long time now.  It started when I first
began to use Dovecot (0.9x) and seems to have been occurring more and more
frequently as we've progressed through the betas and now into RC7.  I have
been kind of chaulking it up to a "user issue" since the problem only seems
to occur for one user (who has one machine at his office, and one at his
weekend cabin... problem occurs with equal frequency on both of his
machines).  Lately it's been occurring about once every couple of days, but
still nothing that I have been able to reproduce with any particular email
or frequency.  

However as luck would have it the problem occurred today while I was onsite
at the client's office so I was at least able to see that end of things at
the same time.

Essentially the user will have a number of messages in their mailbox (today
for example 13) the download of mail will go just fine until one particular
message and then the download will just stop, eventually returning an error
message.  Trying to receive mail again will retrieve messages 1-9 again and
fail in the same spot.  If you log in via IMAP and delete the following
message (ie. the message after the one that was last received) you can then
POP for mail again and the remaining messages in the mailbox will download.


In the log all we see is the following (over and over)...

Aug 28 16:14:51 mail dovecot: pop3-login: Login: user=<xxxxx>, method=PLAIN,
rip=vvv.www.xxx.yyy, lip=vvv.www.xxx.yyy
Aug 28 16:15:32 mail dovecot: POP3(xxxxx): Disconnected top=0/0,
retr=9/170375, del=0/13, size=1349520