On Mon, 2007-07-09 at 11:45 -0700, Troy Engel wrote:
A new employee started today, when logging into his new mailbox this morning during a walk-through I got a nasty server error response in Thunderbird - something I never see, DC runs smooth as butter for us. Checking the server log I see this:
== snip == dovecot: Jul 09 09:38:54 Error: IMAP(xxxxxxx): Maildir /home/x/xxxxxxx/Maildir sync: UIDVALIDITY changed (1183406107 -> 1183999134)
dovecot-uidlist file had UIDVALIDITY 1183406107 (Mon Jul 2 19:55:07 UTC 2007) and index file had UIDVALIDITY 1183999134 (Mon Jul 9 16:38:54 UTC 2007). This also explains the rest of the errors, Dovecot v1.0 doesn't handle very nicely these UIDVALIDITY changes (v1.1 does better).
For this to happen:
The index files have to be created.
dovecot-uidlist file has to be recreated without seeing the existing index.
Accessing mailbox again with the new dovecot-uidlist and old indexes causes this error.
So the real reasons for these could include temporarily using different index file paths, restoring indexes/uidlists from backups, temporarily using index files for accessing other mailbox.