Hello all,

First, the vital stats: FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE, dovecot 1.0.rc7 from ports.

I have run into a vexing little problem that has brought my deployment of a shiny new dovecot server to a screeching halt. Using 'periodic' I've configured regular backups to occur using 'dump'. I have a monthly level 0, a weekly level 4, and a daily level 8. These dumps take advantage of snapshots to ensure they are taking a backup of a consistent filesystem. As part of the beta testing, I decided to delete my maildir and attempt to recover from the dumps.

Recovery went well, as dump/restore is a wonderful piece of software. I did a quick check at the file level to be sure my mailbox looked like it had when I took the last level 8 dump, and everything looked good. The problem came when I started up Thunderbird to take a look at my mail. When I selected a message, say one that said "knockout daily run output", I'd be reading a different message entirely, like a recent email from my boss! Most of the messages were like this - hopelessly scrambled! I tried just deleting the account in Thunderbird and connecting again, but that didn't change a thing.

What happened!? Dump has faithfully restored the files, including the dovecot indexes... so why are my messages scrambled?

Thanks for your help,
Paul