Troubles with Dovecot IMAP

[MadEgg]

I have got some troubles with Dovecot IMAP server. I'm running Gentoo Linux on a server with fetchmail to fetch all my mail from POP3 servers and put it in my IMAP mailbox on my own server.

This has always worked quite nicely, and in fact, it still does. For new mail.

Each january 1st I create a new folder in my INBOX.Old folder, to archive the mail from the past year. Today I tried opening a mail from december 2006, but it doesn't work. I'm using Thunderbird btw, but it doesn't work using squirremail either. What happens is this: it keeps saying 'Connecting to 192.168.0.15', 'Loading folder', 'Loading message', and then starts all over again. Squirrelmail says the IMAP server unexpectedly terminated the connection.

The /var/log/mail/current containts hundreds of messages like this afterwards:

Code: Select all

Nov  2 21:42:56 [dovecot] imap-login: Login: user=<*****>, method=PLAIN, rip=192.168.0.10, lip=192.168.0.15, TLS
Nov  2 21:42:56 [dovecot] IMAP(****): FETCH for mailbox INBOX.Old.2006 UID 2280 got too little data: 4275 vs 4803
Nov  2 21:42:56 [dovecot] IMAP(****): Disconnected: Disconnected

I grepped the corresponding mail folder(~/.maildir/INBOX.Old.2006/cur/) for the subject of the message and it found it. Message file seems ok, contents are allright. Odd.

To make matters worse: about half the messages of 2006 do seem to load. But they are not the same messages as I click on. If I click on message from 'AAAA' with subject 'XXXX', I get to see a message from 'BBBBB' with subject 'YYYYY'. If I grep on the subject of the message I get to see, that file also exists and seems allright. The same thing happens for messages from 2005, 2004 etc.

So apparently all my messages are still there, but somehow I can't seem to open them using IMAP. Any clues on how to fix this? Things I can try? I really need my old mails...

BTW: is size of any importance to dovecot? I've got thousands of e-mails, my total .maildir is 871 MiB.

[MadEgg]

*kick*

BTW, I also tried the 'Regenerate Index' function in Thunderbird which reloads the index. This has fixed it for 2003 and 2005, but 2004 and 2006 still don't work properly...

[MadEgg]

Help?

[think4urs11]

maybe the index or cache files are corrupt; try to regenerate them. (at dovecot level, not thunderbird)
see http://wiki.dovecot.org/IndexFiles

*edit* looks like a cache problem, according to http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/200 ... 24587.html

[MadEgg]

Indeed it helped to remove dovecot.index.cache from the mail directories. Thank you very much!

[MadEgg]

Any idea what's causing this? Indeed removing the cache helps, but now, a couple of months later, the same problem reappeared. I fixed it in the same way but it is rather annoying...