[Dovecot] dovecot.index disappeared

[Timo Sirainen]

On 9.7.2013, at 20.37, Metro Domain Admin <metro_domain_admin at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> One of my users just mysteriously lost all files from his inbox. I have 
> "mail_log_events = delete undelete expunge copy mailbox_delete
> mailbox_rename" but couldn't find any evidence of accidental file or
> folder deletion. I logged in to find that
> ~user/mdbox/mailboxes/INBOX/dbox-Mails/dovecot.index and its backup were
> tiny, only 552 bytes, when the folder had thousands of messages. Other
> folders were left intact. We are running 2.1.15 (mdbox) on Ubuntu 12.10
> using ext4. The system was rebooted about 10 days before and the full
> INBOX was definitely seen since the reboot. I'm just looking for ideas
> about what might have happened.

Can you find any error or warning messages in the log for this user? Like "rebuilding indexes" warning?

Are the messages still in the mdbox/storage/m.* files?