Deleting files in sdbox

[Jeff Mitchell]

Hello,

I'm curious as to what happens if I were to manually delete files in
an sdbox on the server. A long time ago -- I'm not sure how, as it was
several years ago -- something happened and a number of users got a
large number of mail messages duplicated. Literally duplicated -- all
headers, all body content.

I have a script that can find these duplicated messages (by ignoring
the first few and last few lines of each message, and using SHAs to
compare and find the duplicates). However, I don't see a doveadm style
command to manually delete messages, except for doveadm-expunge. In
the past I've used that with search queries but my experience is that
trying to do many individual operations on individual files with
doveadm-expunge can be quite slow.

So, if Dovecot is going to just say "huh, my indexes/metadata are
wrong, lemme rebuild them", I'd rather just rm the messages and let
Dovecot do its thing. Again, this is with sdbox storage. Dovecot
version is 2.2.9.

Thanks!
--Jeff