[NCLUG] Problems with dovecot

[Bob Proulx]

Paul Hummer wrote:
> Because I do significant amounts of work from my desktop and from my
> laptop, it's been important to me that both systems have access to my
> mail.

I do as well.  But I do this in a different way.  I have mail
delivered to my desktop.  I use the 'maildirsync' script to keep my
laptop and desktop in sync.  I use SMTP SASL to send mail from my
laptop.  In some ways it is more brute force and not as nice.  But in
other ways it is nicer, such as always having everything local and
being able to read and respond to mail completely offline.

> 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.
> ...
> Does anyone have any tips or tricks in figuring out what's wrong.

It isn't yet clear to me if the problem is with the dovecot imap
server or with thunderbird interfacing to it.  Therefore the first
thing I would do would be to try deduce this by testing with a
different mail client.  I recommend mutt for a mail client.

If the problem follows the client or if the problem follows the server
you will know for sure which end has the problem.

  mutt -f imaps://imaps.example.com/mailbox

> I can't seem to find the log file for dovecot, and so I'm having a hard
> time debugging this.

Dovecot by default logs to the syslog.  This can be overridden in the
dovecot.conf file with "log_path = /some/path".

Debian/Ubuntu:

  grep dovecot /var/log/syslog

Red Hat:

  grep dovecot /var/log/messages

Bob