confused about quota -f

[Andrew Morgan]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Per olof Ljungmark wrote:

> 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.

That warning doesn't make sense to me.  I've been running 'quota -f 
user.username' for years on mailboxes recovered from backups.

 	Andy