Many times Webmail programs like Roundcube or Horde act up and show errors.

One such typical error is Server Error: UID MOVE: Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information.

This error mainly occurs when the dovecot.index file goes corrupt or due to bad mail-related file permissions.

At Bobcares, we often get requests to fix webmail errors as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s get into the details and see how our Support Engineers fix Server Error: UID MOVE: Internal error occurred.

How does the UID MOVE: Internal error show up?

Let’s begin by checking the details of the error.

Recently, one of our customers had a problem with his webmail. He had an error on Roundcube at his cPanel. When he tried to select all then mark as read, unread, or delete, it showed an error like,

Server Error: UID MOVE: Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information.

Causes for the UID MOVE: Internal error and fixes

At Bobcares, where we have more than a decade of expertise in managing servers, we see many customers face problems while managing mail servers.

Now, let’s see the major reasons for this email error and how our Support Engineers fix the top errors.

1. Dovecot corruption

Dovecot works as a popular open-source IMAP and POP3 server for Linux servers.

Often one of the main reasons that end up in Internal error in Dovecot will be the corruption of the related files.

Therefore, when RoundCube webmail reports the error, our Support Engineers check the /var/log/maillog first.

In this case, the logs showed the following error.

dovecot: imap(email@domain.com): Error: read(/home/user/mail/domain_name/email_user/dovecot-uidlist) failed: No buffer space available

This clearly indicated that the dovecot.index file for IMAP was corrupted.

Therefore, we removed the dovecot.index file after moving it to a temporary dovecot.index.back location.

At last, we restarted Dovecot within WHM > Restart Services > IMAP.

This regenerates the index file automatically and that solved the error.

2. Insufficient file permissions

Sometimes, the wrong ownership of files and folders may cause the error like Server Error: UID MOVE: Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information.

Then, our Support Engineers check the permission of the mail folders of a particular account as below.

ls -la /home/user/mail/domain.com/info/cur/

If it is set up wrongly, we alter the permission and that solves the problem. To change the ownership of the cur folder of the info email account, we use,

chow -R user.user /home/user/mail/domain.com/info/cur/

That’s it.

In cPanel servers, permission problems can also be fixed by executing the following command via shell.

/scripts/mailperm username

In a similar way, often special folder names can also error in RoundCube.

To fix, we access RoundCube >> Settings >> Under Preferences, select Special Folders from the left side menu >> Show real names for special folders checkbox and click Save.

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Conclusion

In short,  Server Error: UID MOVE: Internal error occurred can occur due to the corruption of the dovecot.index file or because of the bad mail-related file permissions. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers fixed this error.