I have dovecot to read local mailboxes. It worked for a long time without problems, but last night stopped reading local mailboxes. I can connect to it using IMAP, can read mail received before, but can’t read any mail received since yesterday (June 17, 2025). I don’t see any error messages in /var/log/mail.log. Mail is still in the user’s mailbox (/var/mail/usename).
Relevant System Information:
dovecot version 1:2.3.21+dfsg1-2ubuntu6
Package wasn’t updated since I don’t know when.
Screenshots or Error Messages:
What I’ve Tried:
Restarted dovecot 2 times. 1st time using systemctl restart, 2nd time using systemctl stop, systemctl start.
Main service runs under root. IMAP service runs under each user. Just in case, I changed mailbox permissions to 666, restarted dovecot, it still is not reading emails.
OK, problem fixed. I added another account to my local thunderbird (on another computer), confirmed a security exception, everything started working again.
In shor
Looks like a Thunderbird problem.
Investigating further, I will update this post with the results.
Thunderbird updates are managed by snapd. There was an update overnight. Probably because I didn’t restart it, it behaved strangely.
I hate snapd. It shouldn’t make updates without asking.
It should have asked you to close the app for several days (i think it usually does that for 14 days) before doing the update (and then immediately install the pre-downloaded update delta as soon as you close the app), did that not happen ? If not, that would be a bug, please report it…
Maybe there was a notification, but i missed it somehow. Anyway, I hate snapd because it updates applications without asking. With apt, I choose the time to update, and I know what to do afterwards.
Well, it exactly does not do that for any desktop apps, see what I wrote above, it notifies you for 14 days or so where you can decide to update at your convenience …
If you want to do all updates manually like with apt (with the chance to miss important security updates in time, just like with apt), just turn off that feature completely with snap refresh --hold, that will make snaps never update automatically … for more details and more fine grained control in case you want that, see: