BenV's notes

Mutt imaps weirdness

by on Feb.12, 2013, under Software

Some days shit is just weird. Like this morning.
Somehow my mutt managed to get disconnected from our mailserver, so I restarted it. Mutt goes “Hej, good morning, how about I connect to your mailserver, one moment please”.
“Sure sure”, I think, not really paying attention. After a while it still said “Loggin in…” though. Huh, why is this taking forever?
After checking strace and seeing it wait on a read(3, …) call I figured maybe the connection was somehow weird. However, after killing and restarting mutt a few times (since that always works, right? :-p) it still got stuck on “Logging in…”.

Obviously the first thing I should have done was think “What changed since it last worked properly?”, but I didn’t and went ahead to check out all the logs and other junk on my mailserver. It had one positive (I think) effect: I upgrade my Dovecot from 2.1.6 to 2.1.15 😉
Other than that everything worked great on my mailserver. (Which a working webmail and no complaints from clients confirmed)
Long story short: It’s not the mailserver, dummy.

What changed since yesterday when everything was still great?
OpenSSL.
Slackware had an upgrade for libopenssl to version 1.0.1d, to fix some security issues. Apparently it introduced a new bug. Bugger.
Meanwhile they fixed that library again, so now we’re at version 1.0.1e. Guess what.
After upgrading to 1.0.1e Mutt magically works again 😉

Moral of the story:
Don’t touch OpenSSL if you don’t have to. This thing causes more headaches than brain cancer.




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