[Dovecot] Why does it appear that dovecot is deleting messages after migration?

[Bill Eccles]

On Apr 28, 2014, at 8:40 AM, Steffen Kaiser <skdovecot at smail.inf.fh-brs.de> wrote:

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> On Mon, 28 Apr 2014, Bill Eccles wrote:
> 
>> correctly. But it's only a matter of time before Dovecot, or something, runs "doveadm index -u (usernames) (mailboxes)" on all of the mailboxes. As it does, it deletes thousands of messages, leaving, for example, the same 17 in INBOX and 3695 in "Deleted Items Archive". And 0 in others,
> 
> after you untar the files and before the automagic kicks in, can you run doveadm index -u (usernames) (mailboxes)
> via dtruss to make sure that command is deleting the messages?
> 
> Did you've enabled:
> 
> + mail_debug=yes enables all kinds of mail related debug logging, such as showing where Dovecot is looking for mails.
> 
> + http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/MailLog
> Maybe your client does that?
> 
> - -- Steffen Kaiser

Steffen--

Dtruss showed nothing unusual, and I'll bet you expected that. But this morning, as I was untarring the tarball, I noticed these two processes show up in the ps -ax list:

28445 ??         0:14.98 find . -name *.shr-xs.mydomain.net* -print0
28446 ??         0:00.00 xargs -0 rm

Since the mail services were off, hence Dovecot has no processes listed in ps -ax, I'm sure that I'm blaming Dovecot for something it ain't doing.

(dig dig dig... um...)

Ah... well, don't I feel foolish. It's my own sa-learn script at fault!

My script attempts to clean out the spam/ham folders like this:

cd /var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail/public/.Learn\ as\ Spam\ \(Bad\ E-mail\)/cur/
find . -name '*.shr-xs.mydomain.net*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

and given that these two directories don't exist, it ends up running these commands from /. which cleans the entire hard drive of all items matching the pattern above.

Is there a better way to clean these directories out using native Dovecot commands (so I don't do this again!)?

Thanks for your help!
Bill