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

Brian Henning brian at strutmasters.com
Wed Sep 1 08:52:00 EDT 2004


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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