[Dovecot] links causing dovecot endless search through user's homedirs

[Paul Letta]

Hello,
   My user's imap folder locations are a mess.  Some have them in
/home/username/mail but a lot of them just have them in /home/username.

So I need to have dovecot's base imapdir pointed directly at the user's
homedirs.

My problem now is that a lot of users have many links in their homedirs.
Some even have circular links, such as:

/home/username/foo/foo1/foo2/foo3/foo4 -> /home/username/foo/foo1

All these links are causing some dovecot imap process to endlessly search.

An example of a strace of a running imap processes shows:

stat64("/home/xxx//jlab/jlab/dev/tail/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/resul
ts/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDT
RY/interp/radcor/results/fake/e94010/3RDTRY/interp/radcor/results/fa ...

and so on.

Since I can't get a hold of my users and make them all put their imap
folders in /home/username/mail and configure dovecot to just search
there...

Is there a way to tell dovecot to ignore links ?

Thanks,
Paul

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dovecot1.jlab.org> dovecot --version
1.0.rc15


dovecot1.jlab.org> sudo dovecot -n
# /etc/dovecot.conf
protocols: imaps
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable: /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_max_processes_count: 512
login_max_connections: 1024
first_valid_uid: 100
mail_location: mbox:%h:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
mmap_disable: yes
mbox_read_locks: dotlock
mbox_write_locks: dotlock
auth default:
   passdb:
     driver: pam
   userdb:
     driver: passwd