[Dovecot] Mbox corruption

[Erinn Looney-Triggs]

I am trying to track down an mbox corruption issue that has been 
happening for one of our users. It appears that the mbox file is getting 
truncated and the all important From line no longer exists which then 
leads to the mbox being useless. It also appears, as in most 
truncations, that parts of the mbox are being lost. I am not sure how to 
debug this to find out whether this is a client or server issue and any 
pointers would be appreciated.

Here are the facts as I have them:
Server: RHEL5 x64/ Dovecot 1.2.8
Client: Win/ Thunderbird 2.0.0.23

This appears to only be happening for one user out of several hundred 
across 30 or so Dovecot servers, so I am leaning towards this being a 
client issue, but I don't know a great deal about the low level working 
of IMAP to debug. For example, I assume that the client issues a request 
to the server on the order of delete message 34 and the server then 
overwrites the mbox file (this then would point to it being a server 
issue)? The corruption occurs in a random assortment of this users 
files, so sometimes the inbox, others the Trash or one of many other 
folders this user has. The user also reports that before the corruption 
occurs duplicates of e-mail will start to appear in folders, even 
folders that have been unused for a long period of time.

Oh I suppose I should also mention that this is about the third or 
fourth time this has happened to this user and it seems to happen about 
every 2-3 weeks.

Does any of this sound familiar to anyone? Any suggestions as to how to 
root this out?

Thanks,
-Erinn