dovecot - Mar 2007 - One user having reproducible IMAP issues

Dovecot version upgraded to 1.0r26 (did not fix problem).
The server is a CentOS 4 x86 box.
Using ext3 filesystem.
Previous attempts to fix the issue have included simply moving aside  
the user's INBOX to recreating a new account from scratch.  Sometimes  
the email behaves for a while, but within a day is not working  
again.  In Mail.app (the user's usual mail client) the INBOX folder  
simply appears empty.  mutt (run locally on the server) shows the  
messages there correctly.


The problem is easily reproducible.  Move /var/spool/mail/[username]  
to a backup file and remove all .imap directories for that user.   
Mail may work for a while, but will stop within 24 hours.  The  
SquirrelMail message is: ERROR:

The server couldn't find the message you requested.
Most probably your message list was out of date and the message has  
been moved away or deleted (perhaps by another program accessing the  
same mailbox).
Click here to return to INBOX

dovecot -n :

# /etc/dovecot.conf
log_path: /var/log/dovecot.log
info_log_path: /var/log/dovecot.debug.log
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable(default): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_executable(imap): /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_executable(pop3): /usr/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login
mail_location: mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
mail_full_filesystem_access: yes
mail_executable(default): /usr/libexec/dovecot/rawlog /usr/libexec/ 
dovecot/imap
mail_executable(imap): /usr/libexec/dovecot/rawlog /usr/libexec/ 
dovecot/imap
mail_executable(pop3): /usr/libexec/dovecot/pop3
mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap
mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/lib/dovecot/imap
mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/lib/dovecot/pop3
auth default:
   mechanisms: plain login
   passdb:
     driver: pam
     args: dovecot
   userdb:
     driver: passwd

Thanks!
Alex

???
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On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 13:26 -0700, Alex Boster wrote:

X-IMAPbase: 1173814340 4280058374 $NotJunk JunkRecorded
X-UID: 4280058361                                        

This is your problem. Your UID has gotten higher than 2^31 which
confuses many clients, even though it's still valid from IMAP protocol's
point of view.

As for why it has gotten this high.. Well, recent Dovecot RCs could
break them sometimes, but at least with 1.0.rc27 everything should be
working.

If you remove the X-IMAPbase, X-IMAP and X-UID headers and delete
Dovecot's index files the messages will be given new UIDs beginning from
1.

If this just keeps happening, then I think it's because the incoming
mails contains invalid X-UID headers. Normally those shouldn't break
anything as long as you haven't deleted Dovecot's index files or the
mbox file isn't empty. If they do and you can figure out how to
reproduce it, please let me know.

Anyway, the problems would most likely go away if you just filter out
all the X-UID headers from incoming mails. See the bottom of
http://wiki.dovecot.org/MboxProblems