[Dovecot] Duplicate mails

Timo Sirainen
Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:39:01 -0000

On Fri, 2006-10-13 at 14:12 +0200, Vegar Nilsen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> one of our customers reported a problem after we moved her maildir to
> another disk. (Jail in FreeBSD 6, moved to another disk with rsync.)
>
> For some reason she's seeing duplicates of almost every message from
> November, 2005 until June, 2006 (the move happened in September, 2006.)
..
> Could this be Dovecot that has recreated these mails for some reason?
> (Since the file names are different I doubt that this happened during
> the rsync, instead it must come from some program that conforms to the
> maildir standard of naming files. The mailserver had a different name
> back in November, mail9 was the old name, locusts is the new one.)

There are really only two possibilities:

1) COPY command was used to copy the mails around. For example
accidentally moving to Trash, then copying back and somehow removing
\Deleted flags from the original mails.

2) At some point Dovecot noticed that two files with the same base name
existed, and it resolved the problem by renaming other one of them. This
will show up in logs as "Fixed duplicate in ..." messages. The reason
why these duplicate could come is eg. if you rsynced once, then user
changed flags of the mails and you did another rsync.

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