[Dovecot] apparent bug with filesystem quota and message lists

[Stewart Dean]

Don't know if anyone else uses Berkeley derived filesystem quota, but 
IBM's AIX does.  A little over a week after migrating from UWIMAP to DC 
(with mbox format unchanged) everything is clean except for this one 
problem:
When users go over quota, when they login the next time, the folder list 
is blank.  You can imagine the panicked calls to the Helpdesk.  If their 
quotas are raised or re-graced, Get Mail returns the expected list. This 
behavior happens with a variety of clients: Pine, MacMail,TBird, Horde 
Webmail, etc.
The index filesystem has no quota on it.

I would have to imagine the Dovecot is using (or trying to use) some 
space in the quota'ed filesystems which the operating system won't 
allow, and this results in there being an empty file that DC uses for 
the message list sent to the client.  There are NO messages in syslog 
(other than the expected login and logout) indicating any problems.  Our 
legacy setup has the inboxes in /var/spool/mail, and the folders in 
~/mail.  The problem can happen either place.

dovecot -n returns:
> # 1.0.1: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf
> listen: *:143
> ssl_listen: *:993
> disable_plaintext_auth: no
> login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
> login_executable: /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
> login_processes_count: 12
> login_max_processes_count: 774
> verbose_proctitle: yes
> first_valid_uid: 200
> mail_location: mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/dcindx/%u
> mbox_dirty_syncs: no
> mbox_lazy_writes: no
> auth default:
>   passdb:
>     driver: pam
>   userdb:
>     driver: passwd
Suggestions?

-- 
====
Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources 
Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York  12504  
sdean at bard.edu  voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035