[Dovecot] Why is "UIDVALIDITY changed" fatal?

Timo Sirainen
Sat, 23 Apr 2005 15:25:00 -0000

On 20.4.2005, at 21:01, Chris Wakelin wrote:

> However, in some cases UW-IMAP seems to change the UIDVALIDITY value
> (not sure why!) and when Dovecot tries to sync it notices this and
> gives up with a fatal error on opening that folder. Opening the folder
> a second time is then OK.

When all messages are expunged, UW-IMAP and newer Dovecots (2005-02-08
in -stable) should write a "pseudo mail" (Subject: DON'T DELETE
THIS
MESSAGE..) to make sure the UIDVALIDITY isn't lost. Doesn't this always
happen with you?

> I was wondering why Dovecot can't just rebuild the indexes silently in
> such cases

The easiest way to handle it was to just mark the index corrupted and
let normal error handling paths deal with it. I changed it now in CVS
not to do this.

> (which seems to be done by returning "0" from the
> mbox_sync_loop() routine)?

It re-syncs the whole mailbox, but it doesn't recreate the index files
after they've been marked as corrupted.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL:
<http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20050423/61d9ae7e/attachment-0001.bin>