[Dovecot] Occasional messages cause Thunderbird to loop

[Allen Belletti]

For the last four weeks or so, I have been getting very occasional 
reports of "stuck" messages from three users of my mail server.  When 
this occurs, Thunderbird's status display in the bottom left will 
alternate rapidly between "Opening folder" and "Checking mail server 
capabilities", and will never display the message.

I'm not sure if this is something which crept into a recent release of 
Dovecot, or a problem with T'bird, or something else entirely.  I had 
suspected corrupt messages the first time or two, and was once able to 
copy such a message into my own "Maildir/cur" directory and have it fail 
for me.  Since then I've not been able to replicate this feat.  I also 
thought that it might have been the Dovecot indices becoming corrupt but 
today I tried purging them for an affected user, and the problem still 
showed up.  In addition, for the first time today that user reported a 
message which originally (as of 6 Nov. 2008) worked fine but today 
demonstrates the issue.

If anyone has seen anything like this or has suggestions to try, please 
let me know.  If necessary I can go to full debug-logging with Dovecot 
but I'd prefer to avoid that if possible :)

Thanks,
Allen

-- 
Allen Belletti
allen at isye.gatech.edu                             404-894-6221 Phone
Industrial and Systems Engineering                404-385-2988 Fax
Georgia Institute of Technology