[Dovecot] Many messages clustered around the same date.saved value

[Timo Sirainen]

On 27.3.2012, at 4.16, Joseph Tam wrote:

>>> However, I noticed a strange thing: querying what would have been
>>> deleted
>>> doveadm -ftab fetch -A "date.saved" mailbox Trash savedbefore 7d
>>> showed many date.saved values are clustered around the same timestamp,
>>> even among different user's Trash mailbox.
>>> ...
>>> I can't explain why many different users would have messages with the
>>> same (or closeby) date.saved value.
>> Which mailbox format? With Maildir the date.saved is taken from
>> dovecot.index.cache file, and in some cases that might get dropped.  If
>> it does, then it fallbacks to using the file's ctime.
> 
> mbox.

Ah, with mbox there isn't any usable fallback for date.saved. If it's not in dovecot.index.cache, the current time is used.

> These "wrong" values shouldn't cause problems with expunge queries since
> they err on the side of safety.

Right.