[Dovecot] Clients and dovecot-uidlist

[Thomas Hummel]

Hello,

I'm trying to figure out what exactly (and why) are the consequences of a lost
or removal of the dovecot-uidlist file on an IMAP client (Thunderbird for
instance).

I took for granted that it was that the client would download all messages
again since it might be confused by some UID changes.  But I don't really see
why (on the IMAP protocol level) and I don't know how to reproduce it.

My understanding is that 

  . dovecot-uidlist is not recreated until some client selects the mailbox

  . the client does something like :

     x UID fetch 1:* (FLAGS)

     to begin with anyway.

So I guess the problem does not occur when no new messages arrive on the mailbox
since the same UIDs would be assigned to the same messages ?

But why would that change ? In which situation ?

But can you show me some IMAP protocol command exchange that would illustrate 

  . when such a problem can occur
  . how the client would detect that there has been some UID corruption
  . how it would fix it 

Thanks

--
Thomas Hummel