Most likely non-Dovecot, but I'd appreciate any comments on WTF might be going on here. Preparatory to migration from mbox to maildir format on our AIX mail server, I am migrating from the JFS filesystem (being deprecated by IBM) to JFS2 to better handling the jump in the number of files. Two nights ago, I took the first step and migrated the IT homedir filesystem: copied it to a scratch disk, melted down the FS and recreated it as a JFS2 FS. In order to keep changes from happening to it during this process, I killed off DC (dovecot -n ouput is appended to bottom of this note) and dropped the export of the FS. The bringup was a little ragged due to time constraints and the fact that I had trouble re-establishing the export. FWIW, the homedirs and Inobx FSes are mounted by a majordomo mailing list server. Everything went fine except for an anomaly with old pre-existing mailing list emails in my INBOX and that of a few others. Note that the inbox FS wasn't touched by this process, just the homedir FS for the IT department. What happened there was that the mbox headers went from looking like this:

From owner-hcrcstaff Mon Aug 24 14:53:29 2009

From majordom Mon Aug 24 14:53:29 2009 the rest of the normal header here

To looking like this:

From owner-hcrcstaff Mon Aug 24 14:53:29 2009 Status: RO X-UID: 871476
Content-Length: 1915

From majordom Mon Aug 24 14:53:29 2009 normal header lines here

It appears that the Status, X-UID and Content-Length lines were inserted just under the top line of the header in every old mailing list mailing email header...and not in any other mailing As a result of this, = these emails appear in the email client's TOC listing with blank Sender and Subject fields, even though the data for that is properly in the header further down = This happens both in TBird and Horde webmail. = All these emails (some 300, going back to 2008) are listed in one block, in proper order for their actual date, as having the datestamp of 5AM, when I was bringing everything back up. Unfortunately, because of time pressures, I can say exactly what I was doing then. = I never took down my TBird session while doing this process...and I imagine that others, who haven't said anything and presumably didn't have this problem, left their TBird or IMAP email client up...

Does this anomaly bring to mind anything to you?

FWIW, I plan on doing the students' homedir FS early tomorrow morning.
This time I'll be more scrupulous about tracking things AND I will take down the mailing list and login servers to remove the possibility that they had something to do with this...

dovecot -n output

# 1.1.15: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf # OS: AIX 3 0001378F4C00
listen: *:143 ssl_listen: *:993 disable_plaintext_auth: no verbose_ssl: yes login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login login_executable: /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_processes_count: 12 login_max_processes_count: 774 max_mail_processes: 1024 verbose_proctitle: yes first_valid_uid: 200 mail_location: mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/dcindx/%u mbox_write_locks: fcntl mbox_dirty_syncs: no auth default: passdb: driver: pam userdb: driver: passwd

-- ==== Once upon a time, the Internet was a friendly, neighbors-helping-neighbors small town, and no one locked their doors. Now it's like an apartment in Bed-Stuy: you need three heavy duty pick-proof locks, one of those braces that goes from the lock to the floor, and bars on the windows.... ==== Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Bard College, New York 12504 sdean@bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035