help with cyr_expire please

[Per olof Ljungmark]

Bron Gondwana wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 11:18:43AM +0200, Per olof Ljungmark wrote:
>> It seems I do not fully understand how cyr_expire works. Some background:
>>
>> I've set up a testing server with 2.3.12-p2 with delayed expunge and 
>> delayed delete. In cyrus.conf:
>> delpruneandexpunge  cmd="cyr_expire -D 7 -E 3 -X 7" at=0400
>>
>> and it all worked as expected.
>>
>> Now I'm ready to implement this on our production (2.3.12-p2) machine, 
>> added the proper statements to imapd.conf
>> expunge_mode: delayed
>> delete_mode: delayed
>> deletedprefix: DELETED
>>
>> Then i tested the following command:
>> su cyrus -c "/usr/local/cyrus/bin/cyr_expire -D 5 -E 5 -X 5 -p 
>> user.spamdump -v"
>>
>> and to my horror it did not only delete expunged messages but a fair 
>> share of messages without any flags set:
>> expunged 677607 out of 682456 messages from 30 mailboxes
> 
> Did you check if any "live" messages were actually deleted, or was it
> just expunged messages cleaned up?  I can imagine that being the case
> for a spamdump user that you clean up frequently.

If I redo the command above with same messages /restored from 
backup/mailbox reconstructed/ nothing is removed so something has 
changed. I did a reconstruct before the first run as well FYI.

Apparently there is a parameter that tells cyr_expire to delete the 
message and at the moment it seems it is randomly set between mailboxes. 
I guess I need to dig deeper...

The deletion happens from the -E flag, this much I know now.

 From the cyr_expire man page:
"Cyr_expire is used to expire messages and duplicate delivery database 
entries."

But when does it expire messages and when does it only remove 
duplicates? No further explanation is given furter down:
"−E expire-days
   Prune the duplicate database of entries older than expire-days."

Any guesses as to what this could be if the msg itself is not marked for 
deletion?