On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 10:10 -0500, Jeff A. Earickson wrote:

Hi, I just discovered a whole lot of dovecot.index.log.2 files in people's .imap folders? Are these files needed in the long term? Or can they be zapped if they are more than X days old?

dovecot.index.log files get renamed to dovecot.index.log.2 files when they're full (current logic is >= 128kB and created over 5 mins ago). If there are multiple connections to the same mailbox and it's getting heavily changed, the .log.2 may be useful for an IMAP session that hasn't synchronized the changes for a while.

If Dovecot loses changes from log file, it gives "Transaction log got desynced for index" error and closes the connection (actually this error used to be called "Missing transaction log file" or something similar). It's in my TODO that Dovecot should be able to handle this situation by just comparing old dovecot.index and new dovecot.index and figuring out the differences itself, but that's not yet implemented..

Anyway, in practise I think you can delete all the .log.2 files whenever you wish and you won't see any problems. If you want to be extra careful, you can delete them after they're 30 minutes old. After that they're of no use for anything. I suppose Dovecot could also do that itself when opening mailbox.