[Dovecot] apparent bug with filesystem quota and message lists

[Stewart Dean]

Haven't heard from Timo yet, but in my research on migrate to the 
maildir format from my present mbox standard, I stumbled over this in 
the Maildir Configuration wiki page:
>
> Dovecot can't currently handle not being able to write the control 
> files, so it will cause problems with filesystem quota 
> <http://wiki.dovecot.org/Quota/FS>. To avoid problems with this, you 
> should place control files into a partition where quota isn't checked. 
> You can specify this by adding :CONTROL=<path> to mail_location, for 
> example:
>
> mail_location = *maildir*:~/*Maildir*:CONTROL=/var/no-quota/%u
>   
This, of course is for Maildir format, while I am currently using mbox.  
My current mail_location line looks like this:
mail_location: mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/dcindx/%u
can/should I do something like this to fix my problem:?
mail_location: mbox:~/mail:CONTROL=/var/no-quota/%u 
:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/dcindx/%u

FWIW, there is no quota on the index filesystem (/var/dcindx).

Relying further on the kinde

Stewart Dean wrote:
> 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