Cyrus-2.1.11 error: message is no longer available

[John A. Tamplin]

Dmitry Novosjolov wrote:

>Hello All,
>
>I've upgraded cyrus-2.1.4 to cyrus-2.1.11 and sometimes message could not be
>retrieved from the server, it is shown as deleted but not read in my outlook
>express. Outlook express shows "message is no longer available on server".
>The problem can be fixed manually by deleting message file from the imap
>spool and recunstructing the mailbox. I wonder how to avoid it at all ?
>
>there is nothing interesting in cyrus's log files.
>
>I'm using suse 8.0, sasl-2.1.10. here are my configure options of cyrus:
>
>./configure  --with-cyrus-prefix=/usr/local/cyrus-2.1.11 --with-auth=unix --
>with-sasldir=/usr/local/lib/ --with-openssl=../openssl-0.9.6g --enable-serve
>r --with-duplicate-db=skiplist --with-mboxlist-db=flat --with-subs-db=flat -
>-with-tls-db=skiplist --with-lock=fcntl
>
>here is my imapd.conf file (I'm using sieve):
>
>configdirectory: /var/imap
>partition-default: /cyrus/mail
>admins: cyrus
>allowanonymouslogin: no
>allowplaintext: yes
>sasl_pwcheck_method: auxprop
>sasl_auto_transition: yes
>hashimapspool:true
>reject8bit: no
>sieveusehomedir: false
>sievedir: /var/lib/sieve
>sendmail: /usr/sbin/sendmail
>  
>
When I asked that question here, I was told it was a known bug in OE.  I 
only saw it a few times in a 2300 user base, and I have not seen it 
since I applied my patch for flushing seen state to disk after any 
change (search the archives for it - if you have a lot of OE users you 
will definitely want it since it uses multiple connections to manipulate 
the seen state, but if your machine is already having a lot of disk IO 
you may not be able to handle the additional traffic).  I don't know if 
that is coincidence or related.

You don't have to reconstruct the mailbox to fix it -- you can delete 
the account in OE and recreate it (doesn't lose anything), or I have 
also been told that you can drag the offending message to another folder 
and back expunging in both places.  You can tell it is a client problem 
rather than a server problem because using another client (even a 
different instance of OE configured fresh for the account) while that OE 
is having a problem will see the message just fine.

-- 
John A. Tamplin
Unix Systems Administrator