No list email - and now I know why

[Don Levey]

fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com wrote:
> I can see from the archives that there has been consistent list
> traffic throughout the weekend, but I haven't seen anything since
> 4:38am (Eastern US time) on Friday.  I've gotten other mail from
> elsewhere; has there been some sort of change in the delivery rules
> which would account for this?
>
>  -Don

To follow up - I found from going through my server logs that I was indeed
accumulating email for this account - or at least other servers are
connecting.  Trying to get in through Squirrelmail, however, gives me:

ERROR : Could not complete request.
Query: SELECT "INBOX"
Reason Given: Internal error occured. Refer to server log for more
information. [2005-06-27 12:31:25]

The errors matching that timestamp in the maillog file tell me that:
	"file isn't in mbox format"

Going in via mutt asks me if I want to create the file, as it doesn't exist
(!).  Going to ~user/~mail/.imap, the file 'Inbox' is there, and last
touched on Friday morning.  I can get to other folders for this user (such
as Trash) but I can't move a message to the Inbox.  The file
/var/spool/mail/<user> is there, last touched this morning (so I must be
accumulating the messages there - the last message is from just a few
minutes ago).

Googling on the error itself brought me to this:
http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2005-February/006168.html

"I cannot reproduce this error everytime, but it seems to happen when
Outlook tries to delete the first message (the first message in the
file, message on top) in the /var/mail/user file."

The post goes on to say that this is a problem with Outlook as a MUA, and
that deleting the first two lines of the /var/spool/mail/<user> file works
like a charm.  And indeed it does.  I'm now downloading 885 messages that
this account accumulated in the interim.

 -Don