Account Locked Without Warning, can't be cleared without webmail

[yositimy]

Thanks, I think perhaps plausible by some stretch, but unlikely.

Let me say that I have been very happy with Fastmail for over a decade, and this does not change my mind. I looked at it as reporting something unusual happening, perhaps as a result of all the recent changes, that Fastmail may want to look into... as well as suggesting email status be returned.

I think, to keep it simple, this is what happened.

1) Whether the account was full or not, the Fastmail server got in a state where it thought an account was full (this seems to happen now and again if you believe the reports here).

2) In this state the server may have sent IMAP type warnings to the clients, but I hear some clients don't process them. So its not clear. There were no emails sent, which in an ideal world may be redundant.

3) In this state, a directory or list of messages in the client's deleted trash folder is empty, so the client cannot purge them.

4) In this state the server rejected requests from the clients to delete message (move them to trash). Since there was no time out I'm assuming the client is responding to something the server sends. If the server sends a reason code its something the client does not understand.

5) This server state was released upon notification box acknowledgement (which is only available to us in the webmail interface). Perhaps there is an IMAP mechanism that acknowledges the warning that the client does not implement. At any rate neither the iOS or MacMail clients displayed a warning.

We should stop blaming the client, although that can be second nature, as it appears to not be the entire problem. The client is what it is and very popular.. Regardless, a robust email server should be able to deal with popular clients without locking up or requiring logging into webmail. Suggesting the user use another client is unacceptable in this day and age. Every client I know of has one issue or another.


Thanks.

[BritTim]

Again, I do not believe the notification message about the account being full existed until you logged in. Perhaps, you would have preferred it to have produced a message "thinking ..." until it checked if there were deleted messages that could be purged, and only produced the warning that the account was full if there was still a problem after doing any possible purge operations. This would have been truly confusing, as you then obfuscate the fact that the account was full.

One point:

In this state it rejected requests from the clients to delete message (move them to trash)

This is expected behavior, documented,, and according to the RFCs. A move requires the message to be in two different folders, until optionally purged from the original folder. This increase in storage space used is not permitted when the account is full. On the other hand, a delete in place and then a purge should be possible. If the client only allows deletion by moving the message to another folder (whether it is called "trash" or anything else) then this is a design error. If the client cannot purge already deleted messages, this is a design error.

Perhaps you found a bug in Cyrus IMAP triggered by some edge condition that the web client is lucky to avoid, but I consider this much less likely than design errors in the IMAP support of the IOS mail client (especially,since, as I posted earlier, I have found bugs in this client's IMAP support in the past).

[yositimy]

By chance, have you reported the bugs to Apple and what was their reply? I think all clients have one bug or another, some being more annoying...

In this case, the server sent an IMAP notification to the client and waited for a reply, which it didn't get until we logged into webmail. Or perhaps there was something independent happening on the server side that was impacting the service (server was too busy maybe?)... and we are chasing a red herring... I hate when that happens

Two years ago, under similar circumstances on another account, I received emails that I was over the storage limit. I was able to see and "delete" messages from my MacMail client which resolved the over quota condition without issue.

Given that there was nor something else going on, what seemed to be changed since then is that the server identified a full mailbox condition, probably incorrectly, and sent IMAP notifications. Then the server waited until the notification is acknowledged. (as mentioned elsewhere in this forum, emails were not sent at 90 91, 92, .... 100% or the server was in a state where it could not send them... there could have been IMAP notifications I dunno)

Perhaps neither the iOS or Mavericks Mail clients implement the IMAP notifications properly. I dunno, but the server acted as if it did not get a reply and was waiting. I trust the server sent these IAW the RFCs

Everything else you say is true and I appreciate the background discussion, but perhaps irrelevant.

[BritTim]

We are agreed on one point: it was something the web client did after being started that resolved the problem.

My explanation is that

• The web client asked the server how much storage was in use. The server responded.
• The web client displayed a warning message that the account was 101% full
• In the background, the web client steadily purged deleted messages
• The IOS web client started working properly once the storage had been reduced sufficiently
• Your impression that the account full condition resolved itself when you acknowledged the original warning message was incorrect.

I am not too sure exactly what you are saying occurred, but I think it is something like this

• The server locked the account because it erroneously decided that the account was full
• When you started the web client, it displayed a message saying that the account was full (as a result of the bug in Cyrus IMAP that had erroneously concluded that)
• When you acknowledged the warning message about the account being full, the web client started doing some remedial action of its own, finally resulting in an override of the normal Cyrus IMAP server processing to reset the erroneous account full indication and unlock the account

Neither of us is going to easily convince the other, and I shall not bother responding further to this thread.

[yositimy]

Originally Posted by BritTim

[*]Your impression that the account full condition resolved itself when you acknowledged the original warning message was incorrect.

Lets just say you are incorrect with this statement and is probably the basis of your incorrect presumption during the subsequent steps. Several minutes after the web server was opened and showing less that 60% the clients were still unable to function. It was only after acknowledgment of the prompt that that the log jam pretty much instantaneously released. I don't have the resources or desire to reproduce.

I don't think I can do any thing short of reproducing the issue to convince you otherwise, so I'm not going to try... but thanks for trying to understand.

We all know engineers/developers know everything (at least thats what my more liberal friends tell me). If it doesn't make sense then it just can't be true.

[yositimy]

It seems that numerous clients block or do not process IMAP alerts because they are extremely annoying and are worse than not using them. Many users prefer that MacMail ignores them. Perhaps a violation of a standard but seems to be a much more user friendly behavior, especially when the server sends a warning at certain levels like FM has done in the past.:

"The warnings are displayed obtrusively by standard. This is most harmful when doing a seach of the entire mail account: the warning is issued every time the mail client enters a new folder, and thus one has to guard the computer as it goes through the dozens of folders, being there to 'ok' moving to each of the folders.

The standard specify explicitly that the application must wait the user to confirm they have understood the warning, before the client can do anything. "

Those using TB have been complaining for years when the use an IMAP server that send alerts:

"This is insanse. The issue has been discussed for 5+ years now and STILL the popups appear and makes it impossible to use TB after an arbitrary level of use of the IMAP server. I read the same IMAP mail from Apple Mail and I dont get spammed by these idioitc warnings. "

There should be no reason to have dropped email status messages. That would have at least let us know what was going on independent of the client before the disaster


Of course now that I say that I get an email from a spammer saying my FM account is over limit and locked. I must to log in at the specified link to correct...

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by yositimy

It seems that numerous clients block or do not process IMAP alerts because they are extremely annoying and are worse than not using them. Many users prefer that MacMail ignores them. Perhaps a violation of a standard but seems to be a much more user friendly behavior, especially when the server sends a warning at certain levels like FM has done in the past.:

"The warnings are displayed obtrusively by standard. This is most harmful when doing a seach of the entire mail account: the warning is issued every time the mail client enters a new folder, and thus one has to guard the computer as it goes through the dozens of folders, being there to 'ok' moving to each of the folders.

The standard specify explicitly that the application must wait the user to confirm they have understood the warning, before the client can do anything. "

Those using TB have been complaining for years when the use an IMAP server that send alerts:

"This is insanse. The issue has been discussed for 5+ years now and STILL the popups appear and makes it impossible to use TB after an arbitrary level of use of the IMAP server. I read the same IMAP mail from Apple Mail and I dont get spammed by these idioitc warnings. "

There should be no reason to have dropped email status messages. That would have at least let us know what was going on independent of the client before the disaster


Of course now that I say that I get an email from a spammer saying my FM account is over limit and locked. I must to log in at the specified link to correct...

Indeed, ALERTS, incorrectly implemented, can be a real pain. Cyrus IMAP has had a lot of changes over the years to improve its implementation. Perhaps the most important is that from version 2.2.9

Only send an over quota ALERT on SELECT if the quotaroot is different from the last ALERT, or we haven't sent an ALERT in over 10 min.