help with cyr_expire please

[Wesley Craig]

On 27 Jul 2008, at 16:17, Per olof Ljungmark wrote:
> Wesley Craig wrote:
>> If you're getting a message like this:
>>     expiring messages in ... older than ... days
>> that's the result of the /vendor/cmu/cyrus-imapd/expire annotation  
>> being set.  It's controlled with the -E flag.  A spam dump is a  
>> pretty typical place to find an annotation like that.
>
> none of the mailboxes had such an annotation but I'm not ready to  
> completely rule this out yet.
>
> but if there is not such an annotation in place, exactly where does  
> cyr_expire fetch the info on to expire or not?

The message:

	expiring messages in ... older than ... days

is inside the check for whether the annotation is set.  So if you got  
that message, the annotation *is* set.  Somewhere.  According to my  
reading of cyr_expire.c, if you don't want annotations checked, you  
should give the -a flag.  If you don't give -a, it will check each  
mailbox and every parent of every mailbox, recursively up to "server"  
or "domain" for the "/vendor/cmu/cyrus-imapd/expire" annotation.  If  
it finds the "/vendor/cmu/cyrus-imapd/expire" annotation (which will  
be stored in the global annotations.db), then instead of cleaning up  
already expunged messages, it will delete messages that are older  
than the age stored as the value of the attribute.

For a particular mailbox, if the annotation doesn't apply (to the  
mailbox or anywhere above it), and expunge_mode is delayed, then a  
"cleanup" is done, i.e., expunged messages are deleted.

It appears to me that if you set the annotation to "0", you might  
still get odd behavior.  A value of "0" (string) is still a value, so  
the "cleanup" flag won't get set.  On the other hand, the expire_mark  
will get set to 0 (int) and the "force" aka "expire" flag will be  
set.  *Probably* nothing really awful will happen in this case,  
because it will be hard for the sentdate of messages to be less-than  
0 (at least for a few years...).  None the less, I sort of feel like  
the annotation value should be converted from a string to an int  
sooner rather than later -- it's used as a comparison all through the  
cyr_expire code.

Another funny thing: the report:

	expunged ... out of ... messages from ... mailboxes

applies to "expired" or "cleaned up" messages.  Not very clear book  
keeping, I'd say.  It would be vastly superior if we reported on a  
per mailbox basis, and were clear which behavior was performed, i.e.,  
deleting otherwise active messages or expiring messages that have  
been previously expunged.

:wes