On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 08:29 -0400, Alfred Nutile wrote:

we are trying to figure out how and email box is not empty. All we did was /mail/user1 /mail/user2 /mail/shared

ln -s /mail/shared /mail/user1/shared ln -s /mail/shared /mail/user2/shared

Perms are fine and people where dropping emails in here fine.

We added a third one and the user also right clicked in their IMAP client and added a subfolder. It was around that time they where gone.

What is "they"? The shared mailboxes? Are there multiple there? Was it only the emails that were gone, or were the entire mailboxes gone?

Could any of these actions cause that? PS it is not a mbox layout.

I don't really understand what mailboxes you had, what format they had, what kind of a configuration you had, etc. dovecot -n output and ls -a /mail/shared output at least might be helpful.

Anyway, the problem is most likely that some client went and deleted the mails, perhaps automatically.