[Dovecot] dovecot 1.x: problem with quota

[Toni Mueller]

Hi,

I have now verified that there is a problem with quota (and sieve?).

Summary:
If the "maildirsize" file gets garbled (= every once in a while),
mail is getting lost randomly.


Details:

I have a Debian box (6.0.5/amd64) with a Postfix server (2.7.1), which
delivers email via Dovecot (1.2.15) to local disk (ext3). My email is
filtered via a sieve script (wish I could have something better, eg.
procmail). The account data is fetched from an SQL database, and I have
a default quota set in dovecot.conf (200MB). My own mailbox has no quota
(*:storage=0, mentioned in the database). A client sent an email to me,
which is logged as being delivered like normal to my mailbox, but
doesn't show up there. After poking around, I decided to simply delete
the maildirsize file and have the client send that email again, and
voila, it shows up in my mailbox. At the same time, however, other
emails get delivered just fine, so the heinous thing is that you don't
immediately notice that something fishy is going on - only when the
client actually calls you (sort of defeats some uses of email)... The
problem is worsened by the fact that you can't tell *which* emails get
lost - you only end up with a random subset of "your" messages.
The problem occurred now after running for a few months.

FWIW, the problem with the garbled maildirsize file resulted in a
different user's email getting bounced due to "mailbox full", when it
wasn't.


Questions:
 * Is this a known problem (Google was unhelpful/unwieldy)?
 * How can I prevent the problem, short of setting up a cron job to
   delete that file every week?
 * How can I log the delivery of messages in dovecot's log, not only the
   POP3/IMAP activity when people fetch their email?


TIA!


Kind regards,
--Toni++