Lots of zero-byte hard link files in cur (and new/tmp), cannot see messages in folder

[Charles Marcus]

Hello,

I have an el-cheapo shared hosting account on Dreamhost, and have had it
for a very long time.

For the most part everything usually works fairly well, considering I do
keep a lot of folders, and mail, on some of my accounts.

They are running dovecot, but still don't have a response as to the
version, or doveconf -n output yet.

My problem is, one of my most used folders, which was working fine up
until a week or so ago, stopped loading the messages, and after some
frustrating troubleshooting via email with people who don't listen very
well, I finally got a tarball of this folder, and they are using maildir.

There are about 24,000 messages in there (non-zero-byte files). This
number sounds about right. All other folders (including INBOX, Sent,
etc) are still working fine.

The problem, though, is there are over 815,000 zero-byte-files in the
cur directory, all showing as hardlinks (looks like maybe a whole bunch
of duplicates for each of the real message files in the cur directory).

There are also 43 non-zero-byte message files in the new directory, and 
1,515 of these zero-byte hardlinks (to message files in the new directory).

There are also no non-zero-byte message files in the tmp directory, but
there are 52 of the hardlinks, linked to something in the new directory.

I've never seen any of these kinds of zero-byte files before on the one
server I managed for a long time (not shared, just used for a single
domain).

Anyone ever seen this before?

Would running:

doveadm index -u myuser *

or

doveadm force-resync -u myuser *

be appropriate commands to try to repair the damage (whatever it is)?

Any other commands I could suggest running?

Thanks. I know I haven't given much to go on.

Charles
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