[Imap-uw] an interesting problem

[Curt LeCaptain]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: imap-uw-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu 
> [mailto:imap-uw-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu] On Behalf 
> Of David Relson
> Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 6:14 PM
> To: Mark Crispin
> Cc: imap-uw at u.washington.edu
> Subject: Re: [Imap-uw] an interesting problem
> 
> On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:07:43 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time) 
> Mark Crispin wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, David Relson wrote:
> > > Since I still have Wednesday's /var/spool/mail file, I 
> can scan it 
> > > for bogus headers.  I've taken a look at the X-UID: lines and 
> > > they're properly sequenced (from 859386 to 86199, with 
> increments of 
> > > 1).
> > 
> > One or the other of those values is wrong.  UIDs must be strictly 
> > ascending, and 859386 is suspiciously high.
> > 
> > -- Mark --
> 
> Sorry about that.  Tis a typo:  the range is 859386 to 869199.
> 
> OOcalc tells me that the numbers are in correct sequence.  Consecutive
> X-UID: values differ by 1 (never more, never less)...
> 
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> 

While those numbers being in sequence sounds relatively normal, the
number on how high they are isn't.  Our issues would stem with e-mails
starting at X-UID to 1, and then be fine for say, ten e-mails, then
suddenly afterward, we'd see an X-UID header with a very large number,
throwing our UIDVALIDITY off, causing a BOGUS sequence error.  The
postfix changes we made solved this issue for us.  This happened mainly
in IMAP connections, but POP connections were having the multi-download
errors you were mentioning.  We're using the older format for the
mailbox format, so for now, they're simple flat-files, and we have to
use both POP/IMAP, generally POP for POP connections for clients, and
IMAP for Webmail clients.  It's really a crap shoot until you have
something sanitizing the incoming mail at the MTA point or at delivery
to local mailboxes.  Hopefully the Postfix changes will help you out.

Curt L.