[TriLUG] a head-scratcher left over from monday: dovecot?

[Jeremy Portzer]

I would suggest deleting the dovecot indexes, which will cause them to
be re-created.  On my system, dovecot keeps its indices in
/home/$USER/mail/.imap/  (with a directory for each mail folder, such as
INBOX).  Delete those directories for the mail folders, and then try
re-connecting with IMAP or POP3.  It should rebuild the indexes and fix
the problem.

Also, why are you using a separate Unix user for the spam messages? 
Wouldn't it make more sense to just send the spam to a different folder,
and use IMAP instead of POP3 on the client?

Jeremy

On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 08:52, Brian Henning wrote:
> Hi Y'all,
>   I've got sendmail handling mail transfer, using procmail and spamassassin
> to filter, and dovecot for retrieval, all running on a FC2 box.
>   I have a separate mailbox set up ('trapt') to hold discarded [SPAM]
> messages for human review (to protect against false positives, though so far
> there have been none).
>   I use Outlook Express to check both my personal mailbox and the trapt
> mailbox using POP3.
>   Last week I was on vacation.  Everything was normal when I left.  When I
> came back this past Monday, I found that for some reason, OE was no longer
> receiving any mail from the trapt account.  Beyond the simple thought that a
> spam trapping account simply couldn't possibly be empty after a week, using
> Webmin showed the expected thousand some messages accrued over the week.
>   There are no error messages to be found.  OE checks the account normally
> without any incident; it simply seems to find the mailbox empty (which of
> course isn't true).
>   I've cleaned out the trapt mailbox on the whim that perhaps the sheer size
> was a problem.  No joy.  In fact, a telnet to the mail server's port 110
> reveals:
> 
> +OK dovecot ready
> user trapt
> +OK
> pass ********
> +OK Logged in
> list
> +OK 0 messages:
> .
> 
> but yet, there are in fact currently 7 messages in the trapt account.
> 
> Is there some way that somehow dovecot could have been 'disconnected' (for
> lack of a better word) from the actual mbox file?  Why does it think there
> are 0 messages when I can clearly see by Webmin, by root% mail -u trapt, and
> by an ls -l in /var/mail, that the mailbox is anything but empty?  The
> wackiest thing is that it's only for that one mailbox.
> 
> Does dovecot rely heavily on the "Do not delete this message!" message
> commonly found at the start of an mbox file?  I've blasted the file once or
> twice with echo > trapt to clear all the messages without having to look at
> them.  That would at least make sense as to why dovecot reports 0 messages.
> I've come to use that potentially crackpot method of clearing mailboxes
> because no other program seems to really care about that non-message.  If
> that's the case, what's the correct way to reform a mailbox properly?
> Fortunately this is a case where I don't care how many messages get lost
> from this account.
> 
> Apologies for the long-winded explanation..  Don't want to leave out any
> details.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> ~Brian
> 
> ----------------
> Brian A. Henning
> Strutmasters.com
> 866.597.2397
> ----------------
-- 
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| Jeremy Portzer        jeremyp at pobox.com      trilug.org/~jeremy     |
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