resend whole inbox to user

[Aki Tuomi]

> On 07/04/2022 09:49 Shawn Heisey <elyograg at elyograg.org> wrote:
> 
>  
> 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

Removing all dovecot* files causes UIDVALIDITY to be reset, which causes your client to download all the mails.

There is easier, less expensive way to achieve this:

doveadm mailbox update

Aki