[NCLUG] Problems with dovecot

[Stephen Warren]

On Mon, September 22, 2008 10:59 am, Paul Hummer wrote:
> fetchmail is set up to grab mail from my many email addresses.  It then
> puts that mail through procmail for filtering, and eventually, that mail
> makes it into a Maildir.  That Maildir is served via IMAP with dovecot,
> so all I need to do is connect to that system via IMAP, and I have all
> my mail.
>
> It's been working very well, until about a week ago.  That's when I
> started having issues deleting things.  I would select a bunch of emails
> in Thunderbird, and then delete them.  The status bar would say
> "Deleting messages" forever, continue to grind, and keep me from reading
> new messages.  I would have to close down Thunderbird and open it back
> up to read messages, but the emails marked for deletion weren't being
> deleted.
>
> I stopped dovecot, removed the dovecot indexes, and started it back up
> again.  This didn't help.  I thought maybe because of the mass of email,
> there were some problems, so I manually deleted emails from many of the
> mailing lists that I follow, and tried to re-index again, to no avail.
> I can't seem to find the log file for dovecot, and so I'm having a hard
> time debugging this.

My Maildir is this size, and dovecot (even an old 1.0.9 release) works OK:

SEVERN:~/Maildir$ du -s .
374572  .
SEVERN:~/Maildir$ find . -type f|wc -l
17823
SEVERN:~/Maildir$ find . -type d|wc -l
457

Logging is set up in $PREFIX/etc/dovecot.conf. I haven't set anything
specific there, and messages appear to get sent to syslog, and end up in
/var/log/messages and /var/log/maillog.

dovecot, whilst very useful for me and basically working, is somewhat
flaky. I have also had to delete index files on a number of occasions and
seen all kinds of hangs/...

I'd suggest trying the latest version (even one of the probably 500 
release candidates for the next release) and seeing if that helps out.

Alternatively, gdb, strace, or tcpdump (to watch the IMAP conversation)