resend whole inbox to user

[Shawn Heisey]

On 2022-04-06 13:29, Marc wrote:
> I was wondering if there is some way to force an imap client to
> 're-download' all the messages from the inbox. I can remember in the
> 'old days' that when the connection was dropped during a pop download,
> the whole inbox was re-downloaded, resulting in quite a lot of
> duplicates. I am looking for such action.

I have my mail in Maildir format.  Here's a directory listing of one of 
my folders:

root at bilbo:/var/vmail/elyograg.org/elyograg at elyograg.org/.Sent# ls -al
total 9428
drwxr-x---  5 vmail mail    4096 Apr  6 22:30 .
drwxr-x--- 82 vmail mail    4096 Apr  7 00:38 ..
drwxr-x---  2 vmail mail  917504 Apr  6 22:08 cur
-rw-r-----  1 vmail mail  131824 Apr  5 17:12 dovecot.index
-rw-r-----  1 vmail mail 7851560 Apr  6 22:30 dovecot.index.cache
-rw-r-----  1 vmail mail     552 Apr  6 22:30 dovecot.index.log
-rw-r-----  1 vmail mail   91520 Apr  5 17:12 dovecot.index.log.2
-rw-r-----  1 vmail mail      84 Feb 26 00:39 dovecot-keywords
-rw-r-----  1 vmail mail  549725 Apr  6 22:08 dovecot-uidlist
drwxr-x---  2 vmail mail    4096 Jan 28  2003 new
drwxr-x---  2 vmail mail   69632 Apr  6 22:08 tmp

Something I discovered mostly by accident:  If I delete all the files in 
a mail folder matching a glob pattern of dovecot* then any IMAP client 
that accesses it will re-download all the messages in the folder.  There 
are nearly 11000 messages in that Sent folder.  Takes a while to 
redownload them.

I don't know if there might be unintended side effects from deleting all 
those files.  My mailbox seems to have survived it.

Thanks,
Shawn