[Dovecot] Stopping imap synchronization on spool failure

[Karsten Bräckelmann]

On Mon, 2008-10-06 at 11:46 -0700, Chris Cappuccio wrote:
> Is there any way to tell an IMAP client to not synchronize/delete old mail
> through IMAP?  Let's say that recent events cause a mail spool to not exist,
> but people may still want to see old messages that are already cached on their
> machines.

This is a client question, and details depend on your particular client.
Been there myself before. (Please don't ask where all the users Inbox
went.) Possible solutions include

(a) Do NOT start the client, but harvest the local cache. With some luck
they do resemble mbox, Maildir or MH, so you can simply re-create the
server-side lost messages client-side and copy somewhere else for later
importing or re-feeding.

(b) Kick the connection between client and server, start client. You
might be able to simply copy the (cached) stuff to local folders, wile
there still is no connection to the IMAP server.

Alternatively, starting the client in an offline mode might do the
same.


In either case, I suggest getting a copy of the client cache *now*
before starting it. So you can start from scratch and harvest the copied
cache as per (a), in case some other way failed.

Since you explicitly mentioned "client caches", option (a) likely would
be the way to go anyway. You got a cache? Harvest it. That's your best
bet. Anything else is just for convenience...

Good luck.

  guenther


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