[Dovecot] Mail lost - maybe a bug???

[Timo Sirainen]

On 17.11.2011, at 18.47, Marco Carcano wrote:

>>> Oct 27 11:20:34 srv001 dovecot: lda(user3): msgid=<e9447410-51fe-45ff-b624-197840b9a862 at usstlz-pinfez02.emrsn.org
>>>> : saved mail to INBOX
>> 
>> If Dovecot logs this, then the message definitely was saved to INBOX.
> 
> it is exactly what I told to my colleagues, but belive me, sometime some mail get lost -

Most likely reason for this is that the user's client deletes the message. Possibly an automatic client side filter or some UI issue that causes user to accidentally delete a mail. The mail_log plugin's logging would have showed if this was the case.

> I suspect however that could be mine misconfiguration somewhere, so that lda sometimes write the email not in the right place, but elsewhere,  and just write the phrase " saved mail to INBOX in the logs (however I'm wondering why sometimes?!?)

I can't think of any reason why it would randomly write to a wrong place.

> I tried to find the missed email in the Maildir, but have not been able to get it - the commands used are
> 
> cd /home/mailboxstore/theuser/Maildir
> 
> grep "6000029222" */* |grep "RE:"
> grep "6000029222" .Drafts/* |grep "RE:"
> grep "6000029222" .Drafts/*/* |grep "RE:"
> grep "6000029222" .Junk/* |grep "RE:"
> grep "6000029222" .Posta\ eliminata/* |grep "RE:"
> grep "6000029222" .Posta\ indesiderata/* |grep "RE:"
> grep "6000029222" .Posta\ inviata/* |grep "RE:"
> grep "6000029222" .Sent/* |grep "RE:"
> grep "6000029222" .Templates/* |grep "RE:"
> grep "6000029222" .Trash/* |grep "RE:"

Only the grep "6000029222" .Drafts/*/* |grep "RE:" was grepping from mail files. Easier would be just:

grep -r "RE:.*6000029222" .

> I really think is some kind of misconfiguration of mine, may you help me, please? Just tell me what pieces of config to show (just not to flood the whole config)

I doubt this is related to configuration.

But you could enable http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/Lazyexpunge so that messages won't be lost if they are expunged. The next time a message is lost, you would most likely find it from the lazy-expunge namespace. (Then you could write a script that deletes e.g. >1 week old files nightly.)