** Kristof BAJNOK bajnokk@niif.hu [2010-02-25 09:04]:
On Thursday 25 February 2010 06.26.27 JP Kelly wrote:
I have had users report that all the messages vanish from their Inbox. The disappeared messages cannot be found in the trash or anywhere else. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Most probably some MUA downloads the messages by POP3. Check your mail server's logs.
** end quote [Kristof BAJNOK]
That does sound the most likely given that all the messages have vanished. I have had problems with vanishing messages with Roundcube myself though.
In my case it wasn't the whole lot, but odd individual messages. At the time the mail was accessed with Roundcube 0.1-stable and Thunderbird (2.x), with Dovecot supplying IMAP only (i.e. POP3 wasn't enabled at all). The only accounts with problems were the ones that used Roundcube regularly, the ones that used Mutt (direct to the Maildir, not IMAP) and Thunderbird had no problems at all (and handled much higher volumes of mail).
At the time I checked logs and found nothing to show any clues as to where the mail had gone. All folders were checked, including local Thunderbird ones, but nothing was ever found. The mail hadn't been deleted since it wasn't in Trash or marked as deleted, and the Trash hadn't been emptied. Since it happened enough to notice, but infrequently enough to make monitoring well nigh impossible the service stopped being used, which further made tracing impractical unfortunately - I hate having problems that I don't manage to identify the root cause for.
The services have been migrated to a new box and I'm currently trying to decide whether to try Roundcube again or not. It may be unlikely since I doubt it would be used due to a lack of confidence/trust.