dovecot - May 2011 - Bug: Fixed a duplicate

I restored a dovecot mailserver today, and when I started the server 
again, the logs filled up with "Fixed a duplicate" warnings.

This in itself it not a problem, the problem is that it appears the fix 
is not done correct. Consider this:

Warning: Fixed a duplicate: 
[X]/cur/1305907573.V807I37682f3M146183.mail8.xxx.com:2,S -> 
1306601066.M382668P27710.mail8.xxx.com

The problem appears to be the timestamp of this new file isn't updated 
correctly.

Now I got hundreds of mailboxes filled with mails named 1305907573.* 
with random (in the past) timestamps, leading to mangled miss-sorted 
inboxes for customers.

3575 May 25 02:05 1306600913.M982997P26976.mail8.xxx.com:2,S
55313 May  6 01:50 1306600913.M982998P26976.mail8.xxx.com:2,S
9839 May  7 23:59 1306600913.M982999P26976.mail8.xxx.com:2,S
3453 May 10 01:32 1306600913.M983000P26976.mail8.xxx.com:2,S
16616 May 14 00:22 1306600913.M983001P26976.mail8.xxx.com:2,S
68850 May 25 00:46 1306600913.M983002P26976.mail8.xxx.com:2,S
etc.

Dovecot is v. 2.0.11

I guess I should have deleted all dovecot.* files after the restore, 
before I started dovecot?

// Tom

On Sat, 2011-05-28 at 21:16 +0200, Tom Sommer wrote:
> I restored a dovecot mailserver today, and when I started the server 
> again, the logs filled up with "Fixed a duplicate" warnings.
> 
> This in itself it not a problem, the problem is that it appears the fix 
> is not done correct. 
You shouldn't have restored an old maildir on top of an existing
maildir. That is the main problem. The same mails had different flags
(=different filenames), and Dovecot just renamed one of the files to
make sure no mails got accidentally lost. In your case it should have
just deleted the duplicates, but there's no such feature yet. Dovecot
works exactly as intended here. The full explanation is more complex
than I want to type right now.