In my setup, I put mail indices outside the user's mailbox locations (user mailboxs are NFS, indices stored local attached storage).
I notice that sometimes, there are 2 sets of indices representing the same mailbox: one at top level, one underneath .imap/. (They usually appear in the latter.) For example, if I have the configuration
(Dovcot version 3.2.21)
mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/nfs/mail/%n:INDEX=/cache/%nI see for a particular user
[1] drwx------ 5 user group 512 Feb 22 21:56 /cache/user/box
[2] drwxr-xr-x 5 user group 512 Feb 22 21:46 /cache/user/.imap/boxcooresponding to their mailbox in ~user/mail/box. Each of these have the dovecot.* index files.
If I delete [1], it comes back. The timestamps are close to each other so both sets are being used, possibly by different clients.
Another quirky discovery is 2 /.imap/ folders beneath each other e.g.
/cache/user/.imap/folder1/folder2/.imap/box/dovecot.indexWhat determines which index pathname gets created or used?
Joseph Tam <jtam.home@gmail.com>