Messed up dovecot mail store, need some repair advice

Aki Tuomi aki.tuomi at dovecot.fi
Sat Oct 22 17:04:52 UTC 2016


> On October 22, 2016 at 7:51 PM Gerben Wierda <gerben.wierda at rna.nl> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hello folks,
> 
> I have an older dovecot 2.0 (which I will migrate to a 2.2 asap, but at this point in time I need a fix). This is a dovecot 2.0 that came with Mac OS X 10.8.5 Server 2.2.5.
> 
> Today, my spam/virus filtering (clamav) on the Server broke down. As a result, all my meesages got the ***UNCHECKED*** tag added to each subject. That was clearly unacceptable. SO, for the tim ebeing I have set that tag to undef so the tag is no longer added. But I also wanted to repair the messages that already ended up in dovecot 2.0
> 
> So, I did something simple: stopped all mail services on the server, went into the dovecot mail store and edited the messages. I first tried with one small ccount and it seemed OK. But now my mail client is experiencing problems with the messages (cannot display) and I think I've been to simplistic. I have for instance notedthat th esizeof the message is part of the filename. So, I can change these of course, but probably I need to change more.
> 
> Can someone enlighten me how I can repair the broken data store?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> (Foolish) Gerben

I think your best bet is to delete dovecot.index* and run dovecot index -u username. Or revert all your changes. Depending what mail store you are using, this might lose any flags on your mails, such as \Read.

Aki


More information about the dovecot mailing list