None of that should be happening. The client shouldn't be able to become confused, because it should see identical mailboxes in the old and in the new server. You can check with IMAP protocol if the rsync actually preserved everything correctly (what's in excludes.txt?) :
doveadm exec imap -u user@domain a select inbox b uid search all
Do this in both old and new server. Make sure that UIDVALIDITY and UIDNEXT replies to SELECT are the same, and also that the SEARCH reply is the same.
Did you stop Dovecot on the old server during rsync? That could explain if it was modified while rsync was running.
On 24.12.2013, at 19.02, Charles Marcus CMarcus@Media-Brokers.com wrote:
Ok, hopefully there is a solution to this.
I've been experimenting with multiple rsyncs in preparation for pulling the trigger on the mail server switch, but have a problem that I really want to fox before doing so.
Apparently something causes Thunderbirds local message cache to get out of sync with dovecot after a sync.
Here is the series of commands I'm running:
stop postfix, stop dovecot on new server
rsync -rltgovDHP --delete --exclude-from 'excludes.txt' /path/to/vmail/example.com/ /var/vmail/example.com/
chown vmail:vmail /var/vmail
start dovecot, start postfix
ls -al /var/vmail/example.com/user/cur
shows all of the messages that should be there, and all perms are correct.
Go to my account that is pointed to this mail server/account, and none of the new messages show up. Also, some messages are still showing up that shouldn't.
I've tried compacting the folders, closing/relaunching Thunderbird, but nothing helps.
The only way to get them to show up is to go to the local Thunderbird cache for the account, and delete the files associated with the folder having the problem.
The problem is, ALL folders will have this problem, which means that everyone will need to delete ALL of their local cahced folders.
This will be a major support problem.
Anyone have any ideas?
--
Best regards,
*/Charles/*