dovecot - Jul 2014 - 1.2.4 disk full errors

Hi.

A user on a rather old mail system we have filled their disk space,
and Dovecot has started to give lots of errors in the logs about
"Expunged message reappeared" and "Duplicate file entry".
The user can
only see a few new messages, not the 33,551 in their inbox.

In the TODO file in the current source code[1], Timo notes that (line 147):

maildir: out-of-disk-space failures apparently cause all kinds of
problems, e.g. "Expunged message reappeared", "Duplicate file
entry"?

[1] http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.2/file/c55c660d6e9d/TODO

Does anyone know what's happening with Dovecot here and how to recover
so that this user can see mail again?

Unforuntately we're on a very old version, 1.2.4. Though there is a
plan for migrating to a newer platform, I need to get this user
accessing email again rather more urgently.

Thanks,

Iain Hallam.

On Fri, 11 Jul 2014, Iain Hallam wrote:
> maildir: out-of-disk-space failures apparently cause all kinds of
> problems, e.g. "Expunged message reappeared", "Duplicate
file entry"?
>
> Does anyone know what's happening with Dovecot here and how to recover
> so that this user can see mail again?
Assuming you use Maildir format for storing this user's mails, based on 
your quote of the maildir todo message...

If you manage to add extra disk space, and access to mail is more 
important than e.g. losing message flags etc., then I'd say you can remove 
the dovecot.index / cache files for the maildirs affected. These would be 
regenerated the next time dovecot accesses the maildir. Could take a while 
tho, for that amount of mails..


HTH..

-- 
Maarten