I have used dovecot now for a couple months. I love how easy it was to setup and how wonderfully it responded to my needs. But now I am wondering whether there’s some inherent instability in its folder scheme, because I am seeing serious weirdness in every single one of my IMAP4 clients (I use four different clients on multiple systems).

Those of you who followed my “Mail on the Treo 650″ thread may have quit reading when it seemed I solved my problems (well, the mail-related problems at least…) by installing Snapper. Not so fast, kimosabe. I am now having trouble with all of my mail clients.

Evolution on Fedora Core 3

This will occasionally just hang. Not for a few seconds, but for the rest of time as we know it (ok, that’s hard to measure, but I extrapolated based upon available data). I had to hard-kill evo in order to try it again… and produce the same results. This went on for over 30 minutes today. There was no CPU load, and the system wasn’t busy doing anything else. Nor were there any oddball attacks against the system (sadly, this must now be considered when systems misbehave. sigh.) I watched all of the system logs and saw absolutley nothing happening. Evo was just spinning… reading folders… forever.

Thunderbird on XP

Same symptom as evo, but the Inbox showed different contents. Very odd.

Squirrelmail (multiple systems access)

This system – which worked flawlessly for over a year with Cyrus – has lately decided that it wants to process folders that I deleted weeks ago. I see nothing of interest in the logs. Just a very upset squirrel that complains about missing folders. And then it loads up fine… and then next time it doesn’t.

Snapper on my Treo 650

Though I reported in another posting that Snapper was now syncing properly, that lasted all of about 2 days. It now (this instant) fails to download any new messages. It is complaining that it couldn’t complete the syncronization and suggests I try again. That’s nice.

The common thread to all of this is dovecot. Don’t get me wrong – I haven’t lost any messages (that I know of…) and each of the above clients do function perfectly most of the time. It’s just that other 5% of the time that none of them work – at the same time – that has me suspicious of dovecot.

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