dovecot - Mar 2007 - Message mixing after switchover from mbox to maildir

Hi everyone,

Here is the story. We are running Redhat Enterprise Linux 4, and were 
using Dovecot .99.x . At
one point, we chose to switch from mbox to maildir (and still use 
Dovecot). After the switchover
our users reported a bug when using Thunderbird:

"A new behavior that I have observed a couple of times is that the new IMAP
server confuses email headers with content. E.g., I have an email from 
Person X,
but when I go to view it, the contents is just a spam body from an 
adjacent header.
With this specific bug, adjacent spams are also running into other 
bodies. This
occurs I'd say once every hundred messages. Other appearances of this 
bug are
with adjacent messages concatenated.

I'm not sure how to explain this, maybe what happens is that the new IMAP
server confuses requests and delivers the wrong message bodies to the 
client,
which get cached.

This could in some circumstances be more than an annoyance, e.g., with
confidential emails inadvertently getting picked up in replies to people
outside the company."

We proceeded to update Dovecot to the latest available version 
(1.0.0-rc25).
However, despite that, our users still report the same bug:

"This bug still persists. In particular, I just (after the new version 
was applied)
clicked on an email from Person X, and Thunderbird displayed an email from
Person Y that I had just replied to. Note that the email from Y was not
adjacent to the one from X (at least, in the temporal ordering)."

I have not been able to reproduce the bug myself. Can anyone think of
where we should start debugging?

Best regards,
Andrey Falko

On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 19:04 -0500, Andrey Falko wrote:
> "This bug still persists. In particular, I just (after the new version
> was applied)
> clicked on an email from Person X, and Thunderbird displayed an email from
> Person Y that I had just replied to. Note that the email from Y was not
> adjacent to the one from X (at least, in the temporal ordering)."
Is it possible that this email was downloaded using Dovecot 0.99 and
Thunderbird's cache was already broken for it? You could tell him to
delete TB's cache and see if it still happens.

Another thing that comes to my mind is that how do you deliver mails to
maildirs? If the filenames aren't truly unique something like this could
happen. Although Dovecot detects that as long as you haven't disabled
its index files.

Anything in logs?

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