[courier-users] Corrupted Mailbox Problems (456,

This email contains a review of a problem I had on one of our courier
email servers that is running courier version 0.52.1.

I resolved the issue, but trying to understand what might have caused it
in the first place. Below I have gone through my resolution, any
thoughts or ideas about the cause would be appreciated.

....

Review of issue and fix.

1) Incoming email to a valid address (realuser@planet-save.com) was all
getting temporary errors such as below

Jun 21 10:38:27 emailserver1 courierlocal: maildrop: Unable to create a
dot-lock.
Jun 21 10:40:38 emailserver1 courieresmtpd: 456 Address temporary
unavailable.

2) All permissions, quota, etc were fine for this mailbox and logging in
via POP3 or IMAP was fine

3) Removed the mailbox from the server entirely, added it back in and
the problem still existed.

4) Removed it again and tried sending, now the error was:

Jun 21 11:44:47 emailserver1 courieresmtpd: 556 Address unavailable.

Since the mailbox no longer existed my expectation was it should have
been getting a "550 User unknown" error.

4) I issued cancelmsg on the four msgs in the mailq for this user. One
of them continued to be in mailq for another 45 minutes so investigated
further.

5) I checked in the mail spool directories manually and found the
following that contained references to this mailbox:

- 3 files in ./msgs/ (I deleted these)
- 1 file in ./msgq/ (I deleted it)
- 22 files in ./track/ (I edited those files to remove the lines
referencing the mailbox)

6) I created the mailbox again after verifying nothing in mailq any
longer and nothing in any of the spool directories. The problem was now
solved and delivery is fine.

....

Questions:

So what could have caused the original problem?

Was the mailq for this user corrupted somehow? What are possibilities
for causing corruption?

Are there any tools for situations like this to purge any information in
the spool directories besides cancelmsg? I know it would not follow RFC
for delivery failure notification, but that method did not work in this
situation.

What do the /track/ files do?

Thanks,

charles uchu strader



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