dovecot - Nov 2014 - dovecot & Apple Mail & maildir & lots of Mail

Hi!

I have dovecot 2.1.12 running on a mail server, and recently
configured Apple Mail to connect to it using secure IMAP, for the
first time.

At the beginning it just showed the inbox and everything was fine, but
then I wanted to look at some of my folders and found the 'subscribe'
menu. When I opened it, Apple Mail went to discover what mailboxes
there are, and that's where my trouble began.

It seemed to make good progress for some time (though slow -- over
days), and now lists the mailboxes from starting with letters a to d
on the left hand side (filling all the visible space, so there might
be more). However, whenever Apple Mail gets focus, the cursor becomes
a spinning rainbow circle and I can't interact with it.

I tried deleting the mail account and setting it up again. The inbox
was shown again immediately and Apple Mail was usable, but the first
time the cursor moved over the mailboxes on the left hand side, it
froze again.

There were two imap processes on the server, one rather idle, the
other eating CPU for about two minutes, then idling, and some time
later it disappeared too.

My Mail directory is 31G with about 180 directories, each containing
mails in maildir format.

Has anyone had similar issues?

Is my maildir too big for dovecot too handle?

How can I debug this?

Thanks,
 Thomas

Am 2014-11-21 um 22:52 schrieb Thomas Klausner:
> Hi!
>
> My Mail directory is 31G with about 180 directories, each containing
> mails in maildir format.
>
> Has anyone had similar issues?
>
> Is my maildir too big for dovecot too handle?
My Maildir is 61G in 237493 messages spread over 424 folders. dovecot 
handles this effortlessly. "doveadm mailbox status -t all '*' -u
<name>"
returns almost instanly on a warm cache. Thunderbird does fine too.

-- 
peter

Hi,

Using Mac Mail with 9 mail accounts, more than 150 folders, and 1000s of mails,
I get far too many problems lately, and not only on dovecot, so I would say the
problem lies with Mac Mail, and even more if you installed Yosemite. As far as I
know dovecot handle very well accounts with 100000s email even if the size is
very big.

And BTW, looking for a fast and reliable mail client for Mac, to replace Mac
Mail, any suggestion?

Regards,
Thierry


On 22 Nov 2014, at 11:39, Peter <pch at myzel.net>
wrote:
> 
> Am 2014-11-21 um 22:52 schrieb Thomas Klausner:
>> Hi!
>> 
>> My Mail directory is 31G with about 180 directories, each containing
>> mails in maildir format.
>> 
>> Has anyone had similar issues?
>> 
>> Is my maildir too big for dovecot too handle?
> 
> My Maildir is 61G in 237493 messages spread over 424 folders. dovecot
handles this effortlessly. "doveadm mailbox status -t all '*' -u
<name>" returns almost instanly on a warm cache. Thunderbird does
fine too.
> 
> -- 
> peter

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 10:52:38PM +0100, Thomas Klausner
wrote:
> I have dovecot 2.1.12 running on a mail server, and recently
> configured Apple Mail to connect to it using secure IMAP, for the
> first time.
> 
> At the beginning it just showed the inbox and everything was fine, but
> then I wanted to look at some of my folders and found the
'subscribe'
> menu. When I opened it, Apple Mail went to discover what mailboxes
> there are, and that's where my trouble began.
> 
> It seemed to make good progress for some time (though slow -- over
> days), and now lists the mailboxes from starting with letters a to d
> on the left hand side (filling all the visible space, so there might
> be more). However, whenever Apple Mail gets focus, the cursor becomes
> a spinning rainbow circle and I can't interact with it.
> 
> I tried deleting the mail account and setting it up again. The inbox
> was shown again immediately and Apple Mail was usable, but the first
> time the cursor moved over the mailboxes on the left hand side, it
> froze again.
> 
> There were two imap processes on the server, one rather idle, the
> other eating CPU for about two minutes, then idling, and some time
> later it disappeared too.
> 
> My Mail directory is 31G with about 180 directories, each containing
> mails in maildir format.
One thing that happened twice now is that files like these appear:
/home/user/Mail/dir/cur/.imap/1312388125.11233_28123.host:2,S/dovecot.index.log
but they don't go away for days.

How can that happen?
Can/should I delete these files?
 Thomas

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 10:52:38PM +0100, Thomas Klausner
wrote:
> I have dovecot 2.1.12 running on a mail server, and recently
> configured Apple Mail to connect to it using secure IMAP, for the
> first time.
> 
> At the beginning it just showed the inbox and everything was fine, but
> then I wanted to look at some of my folders and found the
'subscribe'
> menu. When I opened it, Apple Mail went to discover what mailboxes
> there are, and that's where my trouble began.
> 
> It seemed to make good progress for some time (though slow -- over
> days), and now lists the mailboxes from starting with letters a to d
> on the left hand side (filling all the visible space, so there might
> be more). However, whenever Apple Mail gets focus, the cursor becomes
> a spinning rainbow circle and I can't interact with it.
> 
> I tried deleting the mail account and setting it up again. The inbox
> was shown again immediately and Apple Mail was usable, but the first
> time the cursor moved over the mailboxes on the left hand side, it
> froze again.
> 
> There were two imap processes on the server, one rather idle, the
> other eating CPU for about two minutes, then idling, and some time
> later it disappeared too.
> 
> My Mail directory is 31G with about 180 directories, each containing
> mails in maildir format.
> 
> Has anyone had similar issues?
> 
> Is my maildir too big for dovecot too handle?
> 
> How can I debug this?
I finally found out what the problem was.

My mail is in the folder "$HOME/Mail". For that reason, dovecot
assumed I must be using mboxes (even though it only contains
maildirs), and handled each mail = maildir file as a separate mbox.

I've renamed "$HOME/Mail" to "$HOME/Maildir" and
configured procmail
and mutt to look there, and now it works fine even with Apple Mail.
 Thomas