Shared folder, COPY, OK, message nowhere to be seen

[Janne Peltonen]

Hi!

I've always thought that IMAP COPY should only say OK once the message file is
safely on the disk. So that it should block, should another imapd process be
holding a write lock to the folder.

Now today I experienced something very weird. There was a shared folder. If I
tried to copy a message to it (speaking raw imap), I immediately got an OK. And
the folder metadata reflected the change. However, the message wasn't on the
disk. And wasn't retrievable using IMAP.

I tried this multiple times. Frustrated, I ended up killing the active imapd
processes of all other users that had ACL rights to the folder. My messages
immediately appeared on disk and were retrievable by IMAP. As if they'd been
in-core of my imapd process and waiting for a chance to be flushed to disk.
Even if the imapd process had returned OK, which I'd thought would've meant
they'd already been written to disk.

Now, apparently, one of the users had copied mission critical messages to said
folder and they had disappeared. Disappeared from the original folder and not
shown up in the destination folder. Which was the reason I started
investigating this.

Now, after having killed the imapd processes, I seem to have permanently
deleted all the messages that might have been in-core of any of those processes
(that had told their clients that the messages would've been on disk, i.e.
COPY -> OK). I killed the imapd processes while thinking that 1) there could in
no way be the slightest possibility that the messages hadn't been flushed to
disk from the core of the imapd processes after COPY, as the imapd had answered
OK to the client's COPY command, SO 2) one of the other users' clients must
have had a rule that immediately moves the messages away. But apparently, this
wasn't the case.

Has anyone else encountered something like this?


--Janne Peltonen