dovecot - Mar 2008 - imap sent-mail folder sometimes dosen't get updated when used by more than a mailer at the same time.

Hi,
I'm collecting users feedback of latest dovecot 1.1.rc3 development release.

Some users are complaining that their sent mails sometimes don't get
written to imap Sent-mail folder.

It seems that all these users were using multiple istances of imap
processes to read their mail
(thunderbird+horde-imp, evolution+horde-imp or multiple thunderbird istances).

No error message is written in dovecot.log, no user feedback in
horde-imp/evolution.
Only thunderbird says it can't update Sent folder.

Has anyone had similar issues?

Diego.

On 3/12/2008 1:59 PM, Diego Liziero wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm collecting users feedback of latest dovecot 1.1.rc3 development
release.
> 
> Some users are complaining that their sent mails sometimes don't get
> written to imap Sent-mail folder.
> 
> It seems that all these users were using multiple istances of imap
> processes to read their mail
> (thunderbird+horde-imp, evolution+horde-imp or multiple thunderbird
istances).
> 
> No error message is written in dovecot.log, no user feedback in
> horde-imp/evolution.
> Only thunderbird says it can't update Sent folder.
> 
> Has anyone had similar issues?
Yes... I don't believe this is a dovecot issue, as this is an occasional 
issue with Thunderbird I've seen on both dovecot and Courier-imap (in 
fact it seems to happen more often on the sites that use Courier)...

The only way I've ever been able to fix it is to simply restart 
Thunderbird - but you have to make sure that all TBird processes are 
'dead' - in Windows I often have to kill a rogue process to fix this 
problem.

-- 

Best regards,

Charles

Diego Liziero wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm collecting users feedback of latest dovecot 1.1.rc3 development
release.
>
> Some users are complaining that their sent mails sometimes don't get
> written to imap Sent-mail folder.
>   
I'm having that exact trouble with Usermin as I just posted a follow up 
to an old issue.  See subject:

Re: [Dovecot] IMAP storage - mail_location =    
maildir:~/Maildir:mbox:~/mail/

I'm using dovecot 1.0.10.  However when using thunderbird, I do not see 
this problem.
> It seems that all these users were using multiple istances of imap
> processes to read their mail
> (thunderbird+horde-imp, evolution+horde-imp or multiple thunderbird
istances).
>   
Being my first experience using/configuring IMAP server, I'm finding 
that using multiple clients at the same time, changes are not 
immediately posted so viewing the same account with thunderbird on one 
machine and outlook on another, it appears to get out of sync.  Seems 
mostly the 'delete' or 'move' commands don't actually happen
until the
client program is closed.  I'm finding this annoying personally, but it 
seems to be the way it is supposed to work?

> No error message is written in dovecot.log, no user feedback in
> horde-imp/evolution.
> Only thunderbird says it can't update Sent folder.
>
> Has anyone had similar issues?
>
> Diego.
>
>

> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Diego Liziero <diegoliz at
gmail.com> wrote:
> >  Has anyone had similar issues?
 Charles Marcus wrote:
> Yes... I don't believe this is a dovecot issue, as this is an
occasional
> issue with Thunderbird I've seen on both dovecot and Courier-imap (in
> fact it seems to happen more often on the sites that use Courier)...
> [..]
The fact is that with wu-imap none complained about missing sent mails,
we just switced last week to dovecot (mainly because of really bad
performance of wu-imap)
and several users started complaining about this issue.

Another (maybe related?) strange thing is that local mail (sent by
sendmail) sometimes get delayed to the following queue run (that was
set to 30 min). Even this fact never happened before the switch to
dovecot.

I thought it could be caused by a bad locking configuration, but
Centos5 sendmail should use fcntl, wu-imap should have used it as well
(am I wrong?), and dovecot is
explicitly configured with fcntl, too.

Perhaps, as it never happened with wu-imap, it could be fixed with dovecot, too.

The hard part is to understand why it happens.

Regards,
Diego.

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Diego Liziero wrote:
> [..]
>  Some users are complaining that their sent mails sometimes don't get
>  written to imap Sent-mail folder.
 Tim Alberts wrote:
> [..] I'm finding that using multiple clients at the same time, changes
are not
> immediately posted so viewing the same account with thunderbird on one
> machine and outlook on another, it appears to get out of sync.  Seems
> mostly the 'delete' or 'move' commands don't actually
happen until the
> client program is closed.
Mmm.. the fact I'm reporting is different: you noticed that changes
don't appear immediately when using multiple clients because of local
caching.

Here it happens that mail isn't actually written to an imap folder (sent
mail).

Closing all instances and opening a new one doesn't get the lost mail back.

When it happens with thunderbird, the user gets an error stating that
the mail can't be saved.
With other mail clients nothing is said and the mail is just lost.

Regards,
Diego.