John Hinton wrote:> After about three years of this, it seems I have finally gotten
> somewhere near to the bottom of this.
>
> The symptom:
>
> Suddenly a user cannot download their email. Checking again through
> SquirrelMail, I get an error which says a log was written.
>
> Going to the logs I see
>
> "imap(username): Error indexing mbox file /var/mail/username: LF not
> found where expected"
>
> Using Webmin's read mail module, I can see the messages. So, I move
> them to another account, but this is not yet the end of it. I was at
> first having to delete the mbox and then I'd send a test message in to
> recreate the mbox. But today, I tried a different tack.
>
> I opened the now empty mbox in vi and found one blank line (LF). I
> deleted that line and then moved the mail back in and everything was
> fixed. So the line was still left behind.
>
> The next time this happens, I'm going to try to delete a LF from the
> top of the mbox file to see if it is fixed without moving the mail.
>
> I have read several places, although this is extremely difficult to
> track as there seems to be a multiple from address issue for some
> releases.. but anyway, I did finally find that dovecot .99 has an
> issue with leaving behind an extra linefeed at the beginning of the
> mbox. Deleting this linefeed fixes the problem. Supposedly dovecot 1
> has fixed this problem.
>
> I have found many reports of problems on Fedora and RedHat. Also,
> Debian has a closed bug report regarding this issue as they have moved
> forward to dovecot-1.0 and it doesn't have this bug. The issue seems
> to not have any relation to the mailserver, as I saw both reports of
> problems on at least Sendmail and Postfix.
>
> Why are we still bugged with this? Seems that this is a bug that
> RedHat should be aware of?
>
> The problem is it only rarely happens. I have no idea how to repeat
> the issue. It always seems to be an Outlook user, although that is by
> far the most prevalent email client in use by our users and it might
> just be chance.
>
> So, what to do from here? Bug report to RedHat? This is most
> irritating! I can't even guess how many times I've fixed these
mboxes.
> I'm about ready to toss dovecot in the trash until 1 becomes the RH
> standard unless there is a fix or upgrade from Redhat.
>
> Thanks,
> John Hinton
Having had yet another of these errors, I was able to test deleting the
first line in the mail file. Removing that single LF fixed the problem.
Still wondering what I should do as this is obviously something that is
now very old and very irritating. It is a bug.
John Hinton