[Dovecot] Dovecot LDA issues

Steven F Siirila
2007-03-23T18:08:29Z

We've seen two issues come up with Dovecot LDA, both of which have
caused us problems:

 1) If the user's home directory does not exist, or is not owned by them,
    deliver fails and causes the mail message to bounce back to the
    originator.  In our environment this happens when our user is moved
    to another server (where we move their files, but for up to 24 hours
    afterwards, continue to re-mail their /var/mail INBOX).  This no
    longer works because the user has no home directory, causing deliver
    to fail with "Permission denied" when attempting to create their
    home directory for the purposes of creating INBOX index files.

 2) If the user is over quota (in their home directory), deliver fails
    with a temporary error, causing requeues until the user is back
    under quota (which in our environment could be a long time, days).
    Since we've never had quotas on the user's INBOX (in /var/mail),
    this is a problem for us.

I'd propose for both of these cases that deliver issue WARNING messages
to its logs, and simply not create index files for the INBOX.  If the
INBOX index files already exist, and the user is over quota in /home,
neither deliver nor any other Dovecot process should attempt to update
them, and instead issue WARNING messages.  This allows the e-mail to be
delivered instead of requeued, or worse yet, rejected.  Index files are
supposed to make things perform better, not worse, in ALL cases.  :)

--

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