Re: imap locking problems

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Hi Ken,

I'm sorry, this message has slipped my attention.

In fact, simultaneous access to the same account in imap is
not working properly (the work is underway on fixing it, though).  Until
it is fixed, the recommended approach is to disallow it using the
mandatory-locking statement.

> I discovered in the code a feature called mandatory-locking.  I couldn't
> find any documentation for it.

The syntax is:

mandatory-locking {
    enable yes;
    lock-directory "/path/to/locking/dir";
}

The lock-directory is optional.  It sets the full pathname of the
directory to keep lock files in.  The default is /var/lock/subsys/mail".

> [...] it causes problems of its own.  In
> particular, sometimes I get orphan imap processes that are not really
> connected but are still there.

That doesn't seem to related to mandatory-locking.  Are you quite sure
that orphan processes don't hold an open connection (try verifying it
using netstat and/or lsof)?  Notice, that the default idle timeout for
IMAP server is 30 minutes.  Perhaps you'll need to lower it down when
using mandatory-locking (see the server.timeout setting).

Best regards,
Sergey