Dovecot+Postfix+Apple IMAP+Pine Problems
 

I have been trying to set up Dovecot to work with Postfix, so that I can read mail remotely on an MacBook running OSX. Postfix is set up by SuSE's yast on my linux machine to use /var/mail/user as inbox. Postfix by itself works fine. When dovecot is started and the apple client connects, the meltdown starts: postfix goes through the inbox (which contains many old but read emails) and first appears to mark the messages as unread (as viewed from pine running on the lunux machine), then bounces them all back to their respective senders! The mail log tells me that a few seconds after dovecot notes the remote IMAP client log in, postfix begins to relay (using local) the mail messages in the inbox to localhost.mydomain (with a real mydomain). It tries this a few times before finally bouncing the mail, with a message about mail forwarding loop for user@localhost.mydomain. There are a few error messages about file lock problems, but not for every message.

I've tried educating myself about postfix and dovecot, but nothing seems relevant to this problem. It seems as if it is some evil interaction between dovecot and postfix, but
both "work" fine (the IMAP client sees the emails as they disappear!). Besides file locking issues associated with using an mbox format, I have also heard time stamps blamed (the linux machine had a different time than the remote client).

In any case, before launching pages of configuration settings and log file entries at the
forum, has anybody heard of this type of problem and what is likely to be the source of the problem? I'm happy to dig deeper in the documentation, but I'm not sure where to start
anymore!

Any help would be greatly appreciated, to say the least. Thanks!

dilseymgr