[Dovecot] great disappearing email mystery

[Maarten Bezemer]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2009, Scott Silva wrote:

> on 2-12-2009 10:35 AM Maarten Bezemer spake the following:

>> Outlook DOES store some kind of cache of IMAP mail in a PST. And that
>> PST is always located in the Local Settings directory, regardless of
>> your system-wide default location of PSTs.
>> I don't know what happens when this cache PST reaches its 2GB limit...
>>
> It would take a LOT of messages to cache 2 GB of headers.

I've seen users with about 1GB worth of Maildir folders and some 800MB of 
IMAP cache PST. So it might not be headers only in there...

>> (Running the etch-backports 1.0.15 version of dovecot-imapd currently)
> 1.1 seems to be slightly better with Outlook, or at least my Outlook users
> haven't been complaining as much. They could be resolved to the fact that it
> just doesn't work very well. You won't find it in any Debian repo that I know of.

I can see 1.1.9-1 in Experimental, but nog even in Unstable yet. So I'm 
not ready to try it on production machines.

The 'missing mail' in the 'hide messages marked for deletion' setting 
seems to be persistent. Closing Outlook for the night and then restarting 
it in the morning still doesn't show the messages although they still are 
there on the server and also visible normally in webmail. (Using imap all 
the way, I don't recall if I mentioned that explicitly).
Strangest thing about this is that it only seems to happen when an email 
is read first through webmail. Not always, only just once every few weeks.
Possible something in the headers or flags triggers some weirdness in 
Outlook, making it believe the message is marked for deletion.

> Do you have outlook-idle set in the config file for pop3 and IMAP?

Not using pop3 at all, but outlook-idle is set for the imap protocol.

Regards,
Maarten