On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 11:17 -0700, Mark Costlow wrote:
Hello, I'm preparing to convert from qpopper + UW-IMAP to dovecot.
So far testing has gone very well. One problem we haven't figured
out is that long-running POP sessions keep the mailbox locked, so that
the MDA times out while trying to deliver. We're using "maildrop" as
our MDA if that matters.
..
We though this setting would address the issue:
# Keep the mailbox locked for the entire POP3 session.
pop3_lock_session = no
But it doesn't seem to.
Any ideas?
Switch to Maildir and the problem goes away. The issue is that the mbox
file is read-locked when the first message is read. And since the POP3
client most likely just keeps reading messages for the entire session,
the mbox file kept read-locked all the time. Can't really be fixed
without some larger redesign (which is really not worth it).
We see this as well with mbox and pop3 accesses where some pop3 clients do
not logout (iphone's are the worst offenders) for 30-90 minutes it seems.
Timeout settings in dovecot.conf do not seem to help. procmail backs up
waiting to get access to the inbox to deliver mail.
Is there a global timeout we can set that will close any pop3 connection
after say 15 minutes? Maildir is not an option currently for many of our
servers that use openwebmail, which does not support maildir currently.
Not sure if these pop3 sessions are in a loop, just keeping the conenction
open for a reason, etc... but they do not seem to do anything after the
initial check besides not logging out...
Rob
