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.
While not a 'dovecot' question.. IMAP does NOT download messages in the first place, so there is no such thing as re-download.
I am not sure. In the worst case you have to change all unique msgids or so, not?
You simply set the IMAP client to 'synchronize' if you want a copy stored locally. Eg, in Thunderbird, click on properties, synchronization, Select this folder for offline use, download.
I think the default behaviour of most clients is synchronize the inbox. Download synchronize, what is in the name.