[Dovecot] How to propelry restore a Maildir

[Thomas Hummel]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 05:54:17PM +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> I'm not really sure what you're asking. The file names are unique and

let's say someone has a message named

   1215166123.52887_0.host.dom.ain:2,

in his mailbox. That he accidentally deletes this mailbox (but it has been
backed up somewhere by the administrator or some snapshot mechanisms). Then he
receives a new mail.

Can this new mail be named identically, i.e. 1215166123.52887_0.host.dom.ain:2, ?
if so, it would be a problem when merging.

> UNIX timestamp (seconds since 1970), PID and delivery counter.

I guess that would be answer to the worry expressed above.

> Dovecot doesn't really like if messages get "unexpunged"

Why would messages be considered unexpunged (that would concern only messages
which were previously tagged as "Deleted", right ?) ? Or do you mean that the
index/cache mechanism would notice that messages have disappeared ?

> dovecot-keywords could be a problem if the restored mail used keywords,
> although it currently isn't a problem since keywords never get removed
> so the existing dovecot-keywords file produces correct results. That
> might change some day though.

You mean that the following sequence cannot happen since keywords in
dovecot-keywords never get deleted :

  . message M filename contain keywork b
  . message M gets deleted accidentaly
  . keyword b gets deleted from dovecot-keywords
  . message M is restored but the b keyword isn't known anymore

?

So, apart from this keyword and unexpunged issues (the first one currently working and the second one having the "add a letter" workaround"), nothing prevents to merge (by simply copying messages in cur/) restored and new messages for the user (in the case it wouldn't be an option to let the user do the dirty job ;-)) ?

Thanks.

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