Hello all,

We are using Postfix/Dovecot in a IMAP setting. Everything works wonderfully, but I have one user who complains that her emails are "disappearing".

Now, I can see that her emails are indeed disappearing, however, I think it's probably her running a purge on her Outlook, or something along those lines.

Is there any way I can log this? If not, what should I be looking for to see where these emails have gone??

It seems like a simple enough problem, but I don't see anything out of the ordinary in the log files. Maybe I'm getting blind in my old age.

Thanks in advance!

A common problem with Outlook user's is that they have selected a View that hides read or unrecent email.

Postfix logs (typically /var/log/maillog, or other distro-specific variant) will show what was delivered.

Dovecot logs will likely not show every transaction such as IMAP message deletes, etc. You'd probably have to increase logging, but I don't know Doevecot's logging.

Better would be for you to search the user's mail store (mbox, Maildir) for the "missing" messages.

I usually find this to be a setting on the users side as well..

Read mail being moved, or not displayed due to user settings.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253503

http://www.outlookpower.com/issues/i...001793001.html



Depending on your version of Outlook, click

View>Arrange By>Current View

or

View>Current View and check "Messages" instead of "Unread Messages"


The biggest complaint I get is the user receiving every message twice..
This is usually due to an Outlook screwup, the user running multiple instances of outlook, etc..

Yeah I thought that too. Unfortunately, when I go into her Maildir folder, the messages are indeed gone. That's why I was hoping to find out if I could find it in the Dovecot logs.

I even grabbed all the /var/log/mail.log* files gunzipped them, and did a grep search for various terms (failed, error, etc.) and didn't find anything.

I'll go through the Dovecot documentation and see if I can find anything. If I do, I'll be sure to post it here to help anyone else out with this problem.

Have the user enable Outlook logging. This will be more valuable.

For postfix logs to be of value here, the user must tell you the sender address, recipient address, or possibly sender's domain. You can confirm connections from remote MTAs, and delivery disposition. As to delivery, you can only confirm that mail is being delivered, not anything about content (not without additional configuration). If there is a question about this aspect, create a recipient_bcc_map for that user to make backup copies of the incoming mail, and/or sender_bcc_maps for outgoing mail if necessary. Then, you can use the copies for your own searching for troubleshooting.

Thunderbird users are reporting this on our sendmail/dovecot setup.

Interestingly: Some of the missing messages are showing up in the Trash folder. Is this happening to the missing outlook mail?

There are far too many users complaining about this problem for it to be a keyboard/chair problem.

Which version of Dovecot is the OP using? Ours was dovecot-1.0.7-2.el5, I've updated to 1.1.4 from atrpm.net to see if that will help.

There has been nothing useful in maillogs from Dovecot.

Our issue was solved here just a short while ago. Maybe it helps you, maybe it doesn't, but here goes.

We have a webmail client access on our system as well (roundcube), and what was happening, is that when my user would delete a message, it would go into trash, rather than simply marking it for deletion. She neglected to tell me this detail, and I spent the better part of a few days trying to track this issue down.

Oh the joys of being an IT guy at times.