I use Sylpheed on Etch on my local box and until yesterday I didn’t have this problem. If I log into Usermin as a user on one of the domains setup on the server, I can see, say, 4 or 5 emails.
I have accounts setup locally in my mail client to pull emails off this server as I perfer a local client. I pull gmail and mails off some other servers, too – we all do. Anyway, I have the option to delete all server mail after retreiving as well as to download all mail on the server checked in Sylpheed, for all accounts. Same as always. But I keep pulling down the same emails now – over and over.
Alt+Tab over to my login to Usermin and I see the same mails – all marked as read. They should be gone, first of all, and I shouldn’t keep pulling them down over and over.
Someone else see this yet? Howto fix – my settings are sane, I dunno. I’m prepared to say, “D’oh!”
The only time I’ve ever seen it is with message ID bugs in the client (or when changing the ID format on the POP server–but that only leads to a double download once).
You might try a different mail client to see if this is the case–and if so, find out what POP3 UIDL Sylpheed wants. You can then change Dovecot to use a Sylpheed compatible POP3 UIDL. See the pop3_uidl_format option in dovecot.conf for details on what goes into this ID. And I guess Google would be the source for figuring out what Sylpheed is doing wrong. Updating Sylpheed might also help, if you’re not already running the latest version. IMAP is also a possible solution, since it uses a completely different set of protocols and so is unlikely to exhibit the same problems.
The real cause of this problem was that I had selected to "remove messages on server when received" sure enough, but for some reason I had the number of days set to 7. All of my other accounts are set to 0 as they should be.
So I set the days to 0 and the problem is solved. I much prefer sylpheed.
