[Dovecot] Mails "invisible" (index corrupted?)

[Patrick Nagel]

Hi Timo,

thanks for getting back to me :)

On Sunday 20 July 2008, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 16:43 +0800, Patrick Nagel wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I got a complaint from a user today, that a few mails "disappeared" from
> > her Inbox, both when accessing via IMAP with Thunderbird and in the IMAP
> > Webmail client (RoundCube Webmail, caching deactivated).
> >
> > Searching (in Subject or From header) within the Inbox turned up the
> > missing messages though.
>
> If they're found when searching via Dovecot, then Dovecot sees them..

Yes, searching via dovecot - FTS (Squat) is activated though, if that makes 
any difference.

> > After checking all relevant client settings (filter rules etc.),
> > restarting Thunderbird multiple times, etc., I tried deleting her
> > dovecot.index.cache file, restarting Thunderbird again, but that didn't
> > change anything. Only after deleting dovecot.index.*, everything went
> > back to normal. I can't find anything useful in the log.
>
> "dovecot.index.*"? Does that mean dovecot.index.log* or also
> dovecot.index? You did leave dovecot-uidlist alone anyway?

Excerpts from my bash history file:

tar czf dovecot_metadata.tar.gz dovecot*
mv dovecot_metadata.tar.gz ..
rm dovecot.index.cache

[then we did some testing, problem still persisted]

tar czf dovecot_metadata2.tar.gz dovecot*
mv dovecot_metadata2.tar.gz ..
rm dovecot.index*
rm dovecot-uidlist

[all mails were visible again]

(so probably deleting dovecot-uidlist solved it?)

> > Any hints on what could have caused this? Where to look?
>
> Looking at the actual IMAP traffic would/should have shown what the
> problem was. For example using rawlog:
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/Debugging/Rawlog

I switched on rawlog for that user now.

> > I backed up
> > dovecot.index, dovecot.index.cache and dovecot.index.log before I deleted
> > them, but they probably contain sensitive information, so I won't post
> > them to the list.
>
> Only dovecot.index.cache contains sensitive information. I could take a
> look at dovecot.index and dovecot.index.log, but I doubt they show
> anything useful.

I have attached dovecot_metadata.tar.gz minus dovecot.index.cache.

Thanks a lot!
Patrick.

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