dovecot - Sep 2004 - Lost messages with Mozilla and dovecot 0.99.x

I have just moved our corporate e-mail over to qmail/dovecot and am very 
happy with the performance.  However, I have had two reports of messages 
going missing which may or may not be directly related to Dovecot.

I was able to observe this in action this morning:

1) I got the user out of their e-mail client (Mozilla 1.7.2) and forced 
an email to be delivered.  It showed up in Maildir/new.

2) I had the user log in using our webmail (Squirrelmail) and the 
message was visible to the client (and correctly moved to Maildir/cur).

3) The user then logged in using the Mozilla mail client and not only 
was the message not visible in the client, it was no longer on the disk!

4) This was completely repeatable, even if I deleted the .INBOX/index 
files and forced dovecot to rebuild.

For the moment I am thinking this is a client problem, but I thought I'd 
mention it just in case it rang a bell with someone.  I wound up 
installing 0.99.11 just for grins (I just moved these people to the new 
server and don't want to risk 1.00-test yet).

I'm also going to look at whatever debugging messages are available in 
dovecot; it would be useful to see a log of all imap transactions, not 
just login, so I could confirm that it is the client process requesting 
that the files be deleted and not somethink with dovecot itself (or some 
hardware failure).

Thanks

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite H
Lanham, MD  20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5748

On 21.9.2004, at 18:42, John Peacock wrote:
> I'm also going to look at whatever debugging messages are available in 
> dovecot; it would be useful to see a log of all imap transactions, not 
> just login, so I could confirm that it is the client process 
> requesting that the files be deleted and not somethink with dovecot 
> itself (or some hardware failure).
I think it's highly unlikely that Dovecot deletes them without a 
request from client. Only possibility would be that Dovecot's internal 
state gets somehow messed up and it marks wrong message to be deleted, 
which gets expunged after client issues expunge command. But those two 
steps are still required. If you didn't mark anything to be deleted 
Dovecot couldn't have done it by itself.

For seeing the transactions, rawlog would do it. At the bottom of 
http://dovecot.org/bugreport.html
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Timo Sirainen wrote:
> For seeing the transactions, rawlog would do it. At the bottom of 
> http://dovecot.org/bugreport.html
Yes, this is what I want to debug _this_ problem, but I'd actually 
prefer some additional logging at the server level too.  I'm running 
dovecot-imap under daemontools, so having verbose logging running full 
time isn't really a problem for me.  As long as I can manage 3-4 days of 
logs, I'm happy; I don't need to maintain logs for any significant 
period of time.

Do you think it is worthwhile to add a subset of what rawlog does to the 
server process output?  I'll enable rawlog and see what that gives me 
and then make a more specific proposal (possibly with a patch to go with 
it ;).

Thanks for the quick response

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite H
Lanham, MD  20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5748