Dovecot 2.2.16: disappearing messages, mismatched summaries, duplicated messages, excessive full re-downloads

[David Gessel]

very_dirty_syncs helped a lot - the problems still happen but only about every 30 minutes.  It seems this flag prevents re-indexing on whatever was constantly inducing it (with every client-check, if there was a change written to the directory, is my best guess watching the logs go).

I still get all the same symptoms, but far less frequently.

I'm inclined to believe, as trivial as it may be to enumerate, that:

Something is triggering dovecot to believe the indexes need to be rebuilt.

When checking mail during the rebuild, clients get confused by UIDs in transition.

Today I had to quit TB and restart because duplicates filled my preview pane.  Mulberry has been better, when it gets confused now, it is usually sufficient to initiate a manual check or expunge to get the list to update.

I would think that sdbox would alleviate these issues, no?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Dovecot 2.2.16: disappearing messages, mismatched summaries, duplicated messages, excessive full re-downloads
From: Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi>
To: David Gessel <gessel at blackrosetech.com>
Date: Sat Apr 18 2015 17:38:02 GMT+0300 (Arabic Standard Time)

> On 18 Apr 2015, at 16:00, David Gessel <gessel at blackrosetech.com> wrote:
>>
>>> No. My best guess is that (your) ZFS+FreeBSD is simply not behaving the way Dovecot wants filesystems to behave (readdir() sometimes skipping over files). I don't have any other suggestion than trying a different filesystem or OS. I haven't heard ZFS having these problems before though.
>>
>>
>> Or migrating to sdbox.  Absent any further suggestions, that will be my next step.  My commitment to Maildir is far lower than my commitment to FreeBSD/ZFS.  It is just a historical preference coming from a decade+ of courier IMAP. 
> 
> Actually as a workaround you could try maildir_very_dirty_syncs=yes which gets rid of most of the readdir()s.
>