inbox.lock problem

[Jeewhizz]

I have a user that can't get his mail. Exim_mainlog says its because:

failed to lock mailbox /home/user/mail/domain.com/martin/inbox (lock file)

SO i delete the inbox.lock file, and it works...

then about 5 minutes later, it comes back and stays there.

Any idea how to stop this?

Jee

[positive]

any solutions for this annoying problem?

[jester.ro]

hehe, search on theese forums. "millions" of people have this problem.

it's the way maildir works. u must live with it )

what i do on my servers:

i run /scripts/mailperm every 5 minutes in crontab (i know, sounds stupid, but i have servers very mail-intensive)

mailperm takes care of SOME of the problems.

i also put this in my crontab

*/60 * * * * find /home/*/mail -iname '*.lock' -exec rm '{}' ';'

it removes inbox.lock files every hour.
i know inbox.lock are usefull sometimes, but i'm using this for about a week, and it seems ok.

[david510]

I got the solution.. it worked...previosly posted by Michael(rs-fredo) thanks micheal

The problem is caused by processes. Do a ps aux and you'll see lots of processes with the domain username, some imap, some cpop. Kill them all (kill -9 processNumber). Then delete the inbox.lock file.
This fixes the problem.


/scripts/fixpop //can also be done to solve


Regards,
David

[cPanelBilly]

While these are all work arounds, the best thing to do is look in the inbox.lock file and see what process is using the inbox and see if it is still running. If it is then maybe you should check and see what it is doing, if it is not, put in a support ticket and we will see why it is not releasing the lock file.

[GTFO]

I am having a similar problem with a user, however I never catch the locked inbox. This user previously had the mail account popping from multiple locations simultaneously which may have initially attributed to the problem. Problem is, this user will have their inbox locked, and the message gets put into the queue, and delivers days/weeks/months later. The lock removes itself before I get to it, but it happens with relative frequency. At this point, im not sure what could be causing the inbox to lock. I understand why it does... Is their a log file that might record this ?

[lloyd_tennison]

Simple solution to the multiple popoing for that client - use IMAP instead.

[chirpy]

Or, migrate to maildir (/scripts/convert2maildir) where courier-imap/pop resolves the mailbox locking issues.