[Dovecot] Users can't delete an email (Totally Random effect)

Jesse C. Smillie
Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:07:47 -0000

Hello all...  Found a weird one here.  I tried to search the web but I'm
not having luck so I thought I'd hit the mailing list.

We have noticed off and on all school year that every so often a user
gets an email that they just can't delete using Thunderbird or Outlook
over IMAP (we do not support Pop3 anymore.)  Essentially the user clicks
the email and takes it to the trash.  When they empty the trash the
email appears again in their inbox as if it was new!  Up until this
point I would just tell people to login to Usermin which is still set to
access the email natively through the maildir format and delete it that way.

What we have found out is that emails which have their info fields
repeated twice are emails which can't be deleted.  So for example:
root at gator:/home/somedude# find ./ -iname '*,*,*'
./Maildir/cur/1208807796.29873_0.gator:2,Sb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1205162628.14926_0.gator:2,Sb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1206557108.6542_0.gator:2,Sb:2,STb
./Maildir/cur/1204054624.5835_0.gator:2,Sa:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1208957483.28799_0.gator:2,RSb:2,RSTb
./Maildir/cur/1208803572.18922_0.gator:2,Sb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1209482166.31816_0.gator:2,Sb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1212778554.27192_0.gator:2,Sa:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1210613916.23757_0.gator:2,Sb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1210277191.15311_0.gator:2,Sa:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1204813078.31520_0.gator:2,Sa:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1207318169.27142_0.gator:2,Sb:2,STb
./Maildir/cur/1206732320.12478_0.gator:2,RSb:2,RSTb
./Maildir/cur/1210788980.15319_0.gator:2,RSb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1205432415.9316_0.gator:2,RSb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1204135464.22085_0.gator:2,Sb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1207161276.31798_0.gator:2,Sb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1203969436.24684_0.gator:2,Sa:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1207753826.6079_0.gator:2,Sa:2,RSa
./Maildir/cur/1207832151.6749_0.gator:2,Sb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1212082057.25882_0.gator:2,Sa:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1205856514.5523_0.gator:2,Sb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1207072150.20246_0.gator:2,RSab:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1208800746.30992_0.gator:2,Sb:2,S
./Maildir/cur/1205353851.26747_0.gator:2,Sb:2,S

All of these emails will not be deletable by the imap client.  They will
do the thing I described above.  If I remove one of the info fields they
can be deleted.  We also found if we create a fake email and name it
"test:2,ae:2,Sae" it too will have the nondelete problem.
Unfortunately
I don't know how or why these emails are created.

As far as the vitals go:
We are running Dovecot 1.0.14 now, but I have been able to observe this
problem through a few of the last versions.
The server runs Slamd 64 10.2 (Opteron 64 CPUs) and all of the home
directories are on a ReiserFS formatted Volume

Anything else I can tell you please let me know and of course any info
anybody can tell me about how to make this weirdness go away would be
greatly appreciated.  Thanks.
--

-Jesse C. Smillie

"Insert inspirational or witty comment here...."

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