confused about quota -f

[Per olof Ljungmark]

Simon Matter wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I had to restore a users mailbox from backup which went well. After
>> running reconstruct on the users mailbox I did a quota -f. That fixed
>> this particular users quota but screwed another ones, used quota was at
>> about 1/6 of actual.
> 
> I had that kind of problem more than once. IIRC there were different
> reasons why it happened. 1) There were versions of cyrus-imapd which had
> somehow broken quota functionality. If you used those version you ended up
> with some problems. 2) Using quota -f on a somehow corrupt mailspool
> resulted in all kind of funny things. Fixing everything witch reconstruct
> first has helped, but I think I still had to run quota -f twice after it
> at least with certain versions of cyrus-imapd. The current 2.3.x version
> seem to do fine with me.

A little bit of Vodoo in there yes, I should have mentioned that the 
version is 2.3.8. What was really odd was the fact that quota -f fixed 
the mailbox I had restored and then proceeded to screw the qouta on another.

But does anyone know why it is not recommended to use "quota -f 
<mailbox>"? AFAICS it fixed the problem for me and nothing bad happened.

--per