[Dovecot] Haha wow, thats freakin cool... mdbox

[Timo Sirainen]

On Sun, 2010-07-18 at 03:44 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

> What happens when these indexes become corrupted, get accidentally deleted, or
> have the permissions accidentally changed in a way that they become unreadable
> by Dovecot?  Does Dovecot still report the messages as being in the correct
> folder?

There are multiple layers of safety checks. Mailbox indexes are once in
a while written to dovecot.index.backup files. The backup index is also
used during index rebuild in case something in the main index is broken.

If mailbox indexes get entirely lost, and

a) mail doesn't exist elsewhere: the original mailbox where the message
was saved to is kept in dbox file's metadata, and the message is placed
to that mailbox.

b) mail already exists in another mailbox: it's simply left there. it's
not copied to the original mailbox.

If there's a permission problem, I think Dovecot just logs errors and
fails commands until the permissions are fixed.