[Dovecot] File isn't in mbox format: /home/foo/mail/Trash

[Phil Roffe]

> On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 05:40 -0500, James Lupolt wrote:
>> > Hello,
>> > 
>> > I'm seeing the following error on a server:
>> > 
>> >  File isn't in mbox format: /home/foo/mail/Trash
>> > 
>> > The Trash file is full of the following at the beginning:
>> > 
>> > ^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^
>> > 
>> > I've repaired the file several times, but this keeps happening. Would 
>> > any of you mind offering me some insight into what could be causing this 
>> > and how to fix it?
>>   
>
> This is a known problem with v0.99.x. The mbox code has been rewritten
> in 1.0rc versions and it doesn't have this problem, so I'd just suggest
> upgrading.
We had a problem with this several months ago.  The alarming aspect of 
the corruption is when it occurs at the beginning of an email (i.e. 
^@^@^@From:...).  Emails can be lost/appended to the bottom of the 
previous email.

I've seen this problem several times on our deployment and tracked it 
down to what appears to be NFS locking issues.  Are you storing mails on 
an NFS mounted filesystem? If so check the following...
http://wiki.dovecot.org/NFS

We're running dovecot-1.0 beta5 (admittedly not an rc version but >beta4 
which is mentioned in the NFS wiki section) so I'm not sure the mbox 
rewrite from v0.99.x has fixed the problem.

We had several applications accessing the mbox (Dovecot and Pine 
mainly).  Reconfiguring Pine to use IMAP (using Dovecot) rather than 
write to the mbox directly appears to have fixed the problem and we have 
had no corruption for several months now.

So, my question is am I wrong to assume NFS locking/corruption? Does 
anyone know if this is really a Dovecot or NFS issue?

Phil
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