I am trying to track down an mbox corruption issue that has been
happening for one of our users. It appears that the mbox file is getting
truncated and the all important From line no longer exists which then
leads to the mbox being useless. It also appears, as in most
truncations, that parts of the mbox are being lost. I am not sure how to
debug this to find out whether this is a client or server issue and any
pointers would be appreciated.
Here are the facts as I have them:
Server: RHEL5 x64/ Dovecot 1.2.8
Client: Win/ Thunderbird 2.0.0.23
This appears to only be happening for one user out of several hundred
across 30 or so Dovecot servers, so I am leaning towards this being a
client issue, but I don't know a great deal about the low level working
of IMAP to debug. For example, I assume that the client issues a request
to the server on the order of delete message 34 and the server then
overwrites the mbox file (this then would point to it being a server
issue)? The corruption occurs in a random assortment of this users
files, so sometimes the inbox, others the Trash or one of many other
folders this user has. The user also reports that before the corruption
occurs duplicates of e-mail will start to appear in folders, even
folders that have been unused for a long period of time.
Oh I suppose I should also mention that this is about the third or
fourth time this has happened to this user and it seems to happen about
every 2-3 weeks.
Does any of this sound familiar to anyone? Any suggestions as to how to
root this out?
Thanks,
-Erinn
