Re: deleted inbox messages return on next login

On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Graham Vincent posted:
I failed trying to turn on any transaction logging in either Seamonkey or
Thunderbird. Do you have a favourite client that works?

Pine and Alpine are widely available text-oriented clients that, while not perfect, tend to be a good deal more communicative about what is going on with the server than programs such as Thunderbird and Outlook. Among GUI clients, Mulberry is also pretty good albeit with a somewhat clanky interface.

While trying to up the debug messages at the server end I found an old
instance of imapd still had its claws into the mailbox which seems to have
prevented any changes. I killed it off and everything is working fine
again.

You must be using the 1970s vintage traditional UNIX mailbox format. Only one session can have a mailbox in that format read-write at a time. Something must have gotten that imapd stuck so that it did not respond to a "kiss of death" command to relinquish the lock.

Other formats, such as mix and the older mbx (not to be confused with mbx) allow shared read/write access and only require exclusive access for purging expunged messages.

I like mtest.

Yeah, mtest is good for getting down'n'dirty with an IMAP session or otherwise getting raw mailbox access without pretty interfaces getting in the way. It's also easy to hack at the source level when you want to play with new functionalities.

It's not something to inflict on ordinary users though. ;-)

Regards,

Graham

On Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:31:31 -0700, Mark Crispin wrote:

Your IMAP client probably has some means to log the protocol interactions
between client and server into a transcript file. It is likely that,
buried in those protocol interactions, the server is trying to tell you
what is wrong but the client is failing to pass the word to you.

Many GUI clients are notorious for not having very good error handling
and/or ignoring the various IMAP status codes that indicate problems.
The transcript file should reveal what the client is not telling you.

Here are a couple of things to start with in transcript analysis:

Typically, the underlying problem happens when opening the mailbox. In a
normal session, you will see something like:

00001 select INBOX
* 4338 EXISTS
* 2 RECENT
* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1225167881] UID validity status
* OK [UIDNEXT 58309] Predicted next UID
* FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Draft \Seen)
* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS ()] Permanent flags
00001 OK [READ-WRITE] SELECT completed

Does "[READ-ONLY]" show up instead of "[READ-WRITE]"? Do you see any
other seemingly relevant messages? Look in particular for messages like
"Mailbox is open by another process, access is readonly", "Can't get write
access to mailbox, access is readonly", etc.

Also, is the account is near its disk quota, or is the mailbox file near
2GB in size?

Another thing to do is to run the mtest program (part of the UW IMAP
package) while logged in as the affected user. Give "INBOX" for the
mailbox name, then the "E" command to expunge. You ought to get definite
messages as to what may be wrong.

Good luck!

On Tue, 28 Oct 2008, Graham Vincent posted:
Hello.

I'm running uw-imapd (OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4REV1 LITERAL+ SASL-IR
LOGIN-REFERRALS STARTTLS AUTH=LOGIN] box.gpv.co.nz IMAP4rev1
2004.357) on a FC4 box.

It's been near perfect for years but a recent flood of russian spam
seems to have done something to the inbox on one of the accounts that
is making it impossible to permanently delete messages or compact the
mailbox. The deletions look OK but when you log out and back in all the
deleted messages show up as new again. Attempts to compact the folder
result in no change in file size either.

No error messages in the server logs and several hours of googling have
left me without any further ideas.

Any suggestions on how to fix this are welcomed.

(I fixed the russian spam problem by getting spamassassin to reject non
english character sets).

Thanks,

Graham


-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.



-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
.

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