[gentoo-user] Losing emails

[Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk>]

Greetings,

You may remember my mentioning a fly in the ointment recently. Well, today I 
went to post a follow-up, only to find that the message had disappeared from my 
client, which is KMail. Perhaps I didn't actually send that mail, I thought, 
so I checked the archive and there it was.

KMail runs on this PC (an Intel i5 NUC) and fetches IMAP mail from my LAN 
server (an Intel i3 NUC) which runs fetchmail, postfix and dovecot. I had to 
set this service up because KMail is hopeless with POP3 and Zen, my ISP, 
doesn't offer IMAP4.

The process goes like this on the server:

1.  Fetchmail runs every 5 minutes, fetches POP3 mail from Zen and sends it to 
postfix (Zen's server then deletes the mail).
2.  Postfix drops the mail in ~/.maildir for dovecot to serve to my client 
KMail.
3.  Rsync runs every 20 seconds and synchronises ~/.maildir to a separate 
partition on /mnt/mailbu. The crontab entry is:
*/20 * * * * /usr/bin/rsync -a --open-noatime /home/prh/.maildir/ /mnt/mailbu

The odd thing is that the offending email is present both in ~/.maildir and in 
/mnt/mailbu, so why is kmail not displaying it, or dovecot not serving it? How 
can I tell which it is? I haven't changed dovecot.conf since mid-February.

I've run 'akonadictl fdisk' and 'akonadictl vacuum' but with no apparent 
effect. I could try the sledge-hammer method and emerge -e, I suppose.

-- 
Regards,
Peter.