[imp] Login errors after 4.0.4 to 4.1.1 upgrade...

[Mike Cisar]

Current system configuration is Horde 3.0.10, IMP 4.0.4 and Dovecot
1.0.beta2, using IMP to handle authentication.  The system runs webmail for
the server's main domain and several virtual domains.  When we originally
converted this server from WU-IMAP (VIMAP) to Dovecot we had to jump a few
hoops to make things work consistantly (effectively symlinking the base
domain's mail spool and home directories into appropriate spots in the
virtual domain structure... so for all intents and purposes Dovecot is
treating the base domain's email as virtual).  Once we did this the webmail
just worked without modifying our long-running webmail configurations.  It
has been running in this state for a number of months and it should be
mentioned that both IMAP and POP3 work just fine against both base and
virtual domains with Outlook and Outlook Express (and I'm sure some other
mail clients as well, we have had no user complaints).

We tried in the last weeks to do an upgrade to IMP 4.1.1 but have run into
problems of a nature that I don't understand and am hoping someone will be
able to give some suggestion.  

Once upgrading to 4.1.1 all of the virtual mail domains still work just fine
with Horde/IMP however trying to log in with an account in the base domain
sits for a while and then pops up a page cannot be displayed error in the
browser.  Checking the Apache logs shows a "Allowed memory size of 16777216
bytes exhausted" error.  I have tried raising the memory limit as high as
128M and it still exhausts whatever limit I set.  It should be noted that
for either the base or virtual domains, both show successful IMAP logins in
the mail logs, so whatever is happening on the base domain is happening
after a successful authentication.  It should also be noted that the
imp/test.php test page shows no errors when testing a login from either the
base or virtual domains.

A representation of the main and virtual configuration from servers.php
follows...

$servers['mail.virtualdomain.com'] = array(
    'name' => 'mail.virtualdomain.com',
    'server' => 'mail.virtualdomain.com',
    'protocol' => 'imap/notls',
    'port' => 143,
    'folders' => 'mail/',
    'namespace' => '',
    'maildomain' => 'virtualdomain.com',
    'smtphost' => 'mail.virtualdomain.com',
    'realm' => '',
    'preferred' => 'webmail.virtualdomain.com',
);


$servers['mail.maindomain.com'] = array(
    'name' => 'mail.maindomain.com',
    'server' => 'mail.maindomain.com',
    'protocol' => 'imap/notls',
    'port' => 143,
    'folders' => 'mail/',
    'namespace' => '',
    'maildomain' => 'maindomain.com',
    'smtphost' => 'mail.maindomain.com',
    'realm' => '',
    'preferred' => 'webmail.maindomain.com'
);

In troubleshooting I added the following stanza (found in the Wiki) into the
configuration stanza for the main domain

    'imap_config' => array(
        'children' => true,
        'namespace' => array(
            '' => array(
                'name' => '',
                'delimiter' => '.',
                'type' => 'personal',
                'hidden' => false
            ),
        ),
        'search_charset' => true
    ),

After doing this the problem changes.  The virtual domains all still work
fine, and the base domain now will log into the Horde framework fine, the
user can access turba or kronolith with no problems, but when they click on
the inbox link or otherwise try to get into IMP, at that point the page not
displayed error comes up and the Apache logs again show the out of memory
error.

I am making the assumption that the problem lies with the changes to the way
IMP processes the IMAP namespace, or more specifically how it is traversing
that namespace with regard to the base domain (as seen through the virtual
representation that Dovecot sees as a result of the symlinks).  

Beyond that I am lost... I'll be honest I didn't even know there was such a
thing as an IMAP namespace.  So any suggestions toward resolving this issue
are greatly appreciated.

The easy solution would seem to be just making the base mail domain
virtual... that is not possible/feasible at this time (although it is in our
roadmap) many other applications and systems need to be rewritten first.
While the symlinks used to get Dovecot working are a bit of a hack (we knew
this from the start) other mail clients and even older versions of IMP don't
have an issue with them, so I don't think the concept is fatally flawed.
But it seems obvious that IMP is going off on some sort of a journey that it
shouldn't be when it tries to deal with them.

Cheers,
>>>>> Mike <<<<<