dovecot - Feb 2023 - Get correct subjects in summary but wrong article body after transitioning between servers

I am transitioning between servers (both debian 11.6 with dovecot
2.3.13) and I'm seeing some strange behaviour after the transition: it
seems like dovecot is listing the correct subject for the test messages
I'm sending in what's shown in my MUA's summary.

But the body of the message is an old message.

Dovecot is serving messages from Maildir folders in the users' home
directories.

And I may have messed up some things here: I rsynced the maildirs and
then still got some deliveries both places when the MX records were in
transition, so I did a belated rsync, thinking that "Maildir can handle
that".

But I weren't thinking about the dovecot files, ie:
  drwx------  2 sb sb 155648 Feb 11 06:43 cur
  -rw-------  1 sb sb     30 Nov 23 18:14 dovecot-keywords
  -rw-------  1 sb sb 116407 Feb 11 06:43 dovecot-uidlist
  -rw-------  1 sb sb      8 Feb 28  2022 dovecot-uidvalidity
  -rw-------  1 sb sb      0 Mar 17  2011 dovecot-uidvalidity.4d821095
  -rw-------  1 sb sb  38016 Jan 31 15:38 dovecot.index
  -rw-------  1 sb sb 203852 Feb  5 21:37 dovecot.index.cache
  -rw-------  1 sb sb  15076 Feb 11 06:43 dovecot.index.log
  -rw-------  1 sb sb   6424 Feb  4 08:06 dovecot.list.index
  -rw-------  1 sb sb   7796 Feb 11 06:43 dovecot.list.index.log
  -rw-------  1 sb sb   3048 Mar  6  2022 dovecot.mailbox.log
  drwx------  2 sb sb   4096 Feb 11 06:43 new
  -rw-------  1 sb sb    738 Mar  6  2022 subscriptions
  drwx------  2 sb sb   4096 Feb  6 22:05 tmp

Are there any of these that could have been adversely affected by the
rsync?

Will regenerating these files fix the behaviour where I get the wrong
article when fetching them? 

What is the best way to regenerate them?

Can these feil be safely deleted and will be autogenerated?

(I also see that some of these files are quite old. I had another server
transition in 2017, so the files from 2011 has been rsynced into that
server and not touched since)

Thanks!


- Steinar

>>>>> Steinar Bang <sb at dod.no>:
> I am transitioning between servers (both debian 11.6 with dovecot
> 2.3.13) and I'm seeing some strange behaviour after the transition: it
> seems like dovecot is listing the correct subject for the test messages
> I'm sending in what's shown in my MUA's summary.
> But the body of the message is an old message.
The problem wasn't in dovecot.

The problem was in my MUA (gnus).

I tried a different MUA, thunderbird, and there I saw the same messages
as I saw in the Maildir on the server and I saw new messages appear and
be displayed correctly.

I used gnus with agent cache, and that cache didn't handle the server
move.

Also gnus nnimap seems to be using the agent cache to fetch articles,
even with agent switched off for that server.

Stopping gnus, removing the agent cache for that server (in
~/News/agent/nnimap/) and restarting gnus, fixed the problem.

Sorry about the noise!