--On Monday, October 11, 2004 8:19 PM +0300 Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi wrote:
Probably best would be to check atime of .INBOX/.imap.index file. dovecot-uidlist isn't necessarily accessed every time. And if nothing has changed in mailboxes, mtime isn't changed from any file.
But watch out when you do backups. I'm using dump, which doesn't affect atime, but I do use "restore -C" to verify the tape and that does touch atime. So I temporarily turn off atime on the filesystem while doing the verify.
Example from my verify script:
/bin/mount -o remount,noatime /boot $RESTORE -C -l -L $MAXMISCOMPARES -b $BLOCKING -f $DUMPSUBDIR/boot.dump /bin/mount -o remount,atime /boot
This disables atime updates on the boot partition, verifies the backup for that partition, and then turns the updates back on.
This is precisely so that I can use atime to monitor for dead mailboxes.