[Dovecot] Is this an index problem?

[Chris Barnes]

This is my first post to this list/gmane newsgroup, so please be gentle 
with me....  :-)

Here's my situation:
I have a user (the "main boss secretary") who uses MS Outlook 2007 as 
her email client.   She has over 46,000 messages in her inbox, with 
nobody knows how many more in 75+ different folders & subfolders.

Surprisingly, her response time wasn't too terrible up until we had to 
reboot our mail server the other day (actually, restoring the entire 
server from a backup).   Now it takes anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds for 
her to switch from 1 folder to another.


Details:
* Server is Debian running Postfix and Dovecot (both the current 
release).  Using Maildir format stored in the user's ~/Maildir folder.

* User connects to server via Imaps.  Connection is local using gigabit 
network (ie. it ain't the network).

* Yes, we did all the things on the Outlook side -thinking that is where 
the problem lays.  Rebuild the .pst file, had Outlook re-index, 
compacted the .pst file, etc.



So now I'm thinking that maybe I need to just wipe out all of the 
~/Mailder/dovecot* files (including all those in sub-directories) and 
let it all reindex.   Which begets 3 questions:

(1) will this help?
(2) anyone have a shell script that will remove all those dovecot* files 
from the user's directory AND all the sub-directories?
(3) Any other suggestions I might be missing?

-- 
Chris Barnes