[Dovecot] How to propelry restore a Maildir

[Thomas Hummel]

Hello,

I would like to know what is the proper way to restore a Maildir :

Assuming someone has got a foobar/[cur|new|tmp] maildir, loses for some reason
its content and that some new mail (seen and/or unseen) comes into that mailbox
inbetween (that is before the restore procedure takes place, thus creating the
need to merge restored messages and new ones).

I'd like to check the following (I don't use deliver but procmail) :

  1. the messages filenames are unique in time (meaning that a new message
     cannot be assigned a name already existing in the backup (the name of an old
     message), at least for the same mailbox instance : if that's not the case : how
     can we merge safely ?

  2. what naming scheme is used (the left part of the name, before the :2,) ?

       I've got something like :

       1215166123.52887_0.host.dom.ain:2,[...]

       what are the 1215166123, the 52887 and 0 ?

  3. what can we deduce from the last modified date of the file as seen in ls -l ?

      . when in new/, is it the same as the one in the Received: header or is it when in tmp/ ?

      . when in cur/, is it the date the client "saw" the message ? What would
        "saw" mean in that case ?

  4. should the dovecot-uidlist and dovecot-keywords be updated after the
     restore or is it better to let dovecot rearrange them itself ?

  5. same question for the index and cache files ?

Thanks

-- 
Thomas Hummel 	    | Institut Pasteur
<hummel at pasteur.fr> | Pôle informatique - systèmes et réseau