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Now I'm being told that one.textdrive.com "is not a valid IMAP4 server." I've also gotten two "stack fault" errors.

UPDATE: Well, that's gone away, but only after I removed my old user account and created a new one. This has been a real pain in the ass.

Last edited by me3dia (2005-09-22 20:50:04)

I'm getting the same error on one.

Sorry I vanished for so long today! A thunderstorm in my area brought power down for awhile, and network down for even longer.

Okay, you three. The problem you're running into has to do with corrupted index files. The old version of Dovecot was a bit more lenient about what it allowed. This newer version has better error checking, and was choking on your indexes.

The solution is to remove your index files and let Dovecot re-create them. In your Maildir, there are a handful of "dovecot.index*" files that need to be deleted. This should solve the problem in most cases. If not, the next step is to go into each of your individual mailboxes (such as .INBOX) and delete the .imap.index* files that are in there.

Once you're able to log back in, your mail client will start recreating those indexes for you again.

Hm. Maybe y'all were busy responding to my trouble ticket when I looked, 'cause now that account is working again. Or else renaming the subscriptions file did it, 'cause I did that, too.

Hi me3dia.

I did this to get my mail upa and running again. (Secure Shell access though)

cd Maildir

mv dovecot.index* ..

mv'd instead of rm since then I could revert if everything crashed ;)
Reopened Firebird and I got my Sent and Draft folders back.

If you lack SSH access you can run the a single command from WEBMIN (Running Processes/Command to run)

mv ~/Maildir/dovecot.index* ~

Will do the trick.

Last edited by JoNtE (2005-09-23 06:16:16)

seems fine now :) thanks

cnladd: deleting the index files fixed the problem for a while but when I relaunched Mail.app after a few hours the files seemed to have got somehow corrupted again. The new messages appear on the screen only for a second and then they disappear. I deleted the index files again but I wouldn't like to do that every time I launch the mail client :-/

JoNtE wrote:

If you lack SSH access you can run the a single command from WEBMIN (Running Processes/Command to run)

Code:

mv ~/Maildir/dovecot.index* ~

Will do the trick.

Followed this advice and got this notice:

Output from mv ~/Maildir/dovecot.index* ~ ..

mv: rename /root/Maildir/dovecot.index* to /root/dovecot.index*: Permission denied

Gee, it's broken again. And this time deleting index files doesn't fix it. Different error, though. Mail just silently fails. SquirrelMail reports:

ERROR : Connection dropped by imap-server.
Query: STATUS "INBOX" (MESSAGES UNSEEN RECENT)

And after I deleted indexes it changes to "Query: EXPUNGE". Any ideas? How do I fix it and more importantly, how do I stop it from happening again?

My most important email account account is inaccessible via IMAP or POP3. Can only see the inbox via Webmin. Tried everything suggested here. Filed a ticket. Nothing's happening.

If this were a client's account I'd be taking a serious black-eye.

I'm not gonna escalate my ticket to where it rings somebody's pager. But I want to.

What's pissing me off is the lack of definitive instructions for repairing this myself. I'd be glad to look after whatever clean-up the Dovecot upgrade makes necessary, but I need clear information.

Nate, I'll write-up and publicize instructions for every mail client I can get my hands on, screenshots and everything, but I need the facts. Yes, client-server interaction makes IMAP a special case

Thanks.

LQ

I appear to be unable to enter or modify the maildir giving me problems.

I am still having problems. I did what cnladd suggested in post # 7. I still can't access my imap mail.

e-mail hosted on pendrell

FWIW, I'm on barclay and haven't had any problems at all with email.

Still having problems with imap. Sometimes it connects and other times it doesn't. Should I file a ticket?? I am on Barclay.

Unfortunately, my IMAP problems are back here too (I'm on gilford) :(

I have manually removed all Dovecot index files this morning because Mail.app was getting zombie deleted messages again, it has worked during the day and it now starts to behave weirdly again.

Let's see, what could be wrong here...
- upgrading Dovecot was not such a good idea. Seriously, an alpha version on a production server ?
- Mail.app is a crappy IMAP client, which is possible but I did not have any problem before the Dovecot upgrade so...
- Mail.app and Dovecot now have some kind of incompatibilities which corrupt the index files after a certain time or because of the way Mail.app does IMAP interaction.
- ??

Any idea ?

We're not entirely sure what the exact cause is, but it appears to be client-related.

The new version of Dovecot was accessing the same index files that the old version had been accessing. These index files can become corrupted. According to the notes about upgrading from the old version of Dovecot to the new version of Dovecot, the new version has much better error checking and will not tolerate some of the index errors that the old version tolerated.

The problems were fairly limited, and only a handful of people were affected. There's no rhyme or reason (that we can tell) to who was affected: some people had a huge number of IMAP folders and e-mail, some people hardly had anything (if anything at all.) Clients affected were across the board, but seemed to mainly be Mail.app users. My own personal account is on One, one of the upgraded servers, and I use Mail.app and didn't see the error.

lucsky wrote:

- upgrading Dovecot was not such a good idea. Seriously, an alpha version on a production server ?

The version we've upgraded to is the recommended version. The previous version is a few years old, is no longer actively being updated, and has had several problems that were fixed in this version (problems whose resolution is "upgrade to the recommended version, it's more stable.")

Okay, I created a new email account and everything works just dandy. So I decided to do as complete a reset as possible on my old email account (I use Mac OS X Mail).

First I took the mail account offline and deleted it from the preferences panel.

Then I ssh'ed in and from Maildir ran the following:

rm subscriptions
rm .subscriptions
rm dovecot*
rm .imap.index*
rm .*/dovecot*
rm .*/.imap.index*

Then I added the account back to mail and am letting it completely update before touching anything. Right now it's still synchronizing Deleted Messages (should of deleted those first), but I'm not gonna touch anything til its done.

BTW, any thoughts on maybe the corruption happening due to mixing IMAP clients at the same time? My dialup is so slow I often log into webmail with Mail open and synchronizing...

My IMAP access was completely fubar again this morning: new messages were not showing up and messages which I had deleted yesterday were constantly reappearing. So I did exactly what dasil003 did: deleted my IMAP email account from Mail.app, removed all Dovecot subscriptions and index files from my Maildir folder, then recreated the account, yadda yadda yadda.

So far so good, but in order to really try to track this one down I have also changed some of the account settings in Mail.app:

• Since my problems were mostly occuring with deleted messages, I have switched the "Move deleted messages to the Trash Mailbox" to OFF, which forces the "Store deleted messages on the server" option to ON.

• Disabled the "Compact Mailbox Automatically" option. I'm not sure about this one though.

  Now waiting for shit to happen again... ;)