messages in mailbox aren't visible

[Bron Gondwana]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 06:38:27AM -0500, Patrick Goetz wrote:
> On 10/12/2010 8:49 PM, Wesley Craig wrote:
> >
> > \Noselect is the result of LIST et al not finding the mailbox in question. It's not "set" per se, but returned descriptively. Given the odd sort order from ctl_mboxlist -d, incompatible sort order is why LIST can't see it.
> >
> 
> Wes, Bron, thanks for the tremendous help/clarification with this -- 
> this sounds like it could be my problem.  Just one more question, 
> because the documentation is a bit unclear.  I think what I need to do is:

>    --------------
>    stop cyrus
>    add "improved_mboxlist_sort: 1" to /etc/imapd.conf
>    ctl_mboxlist -d -x > mailbox_list.txt
>    ctl_mboxlist -u < mailbox_list.txt
>    start cyrus
>    --------------

I would re-order that:

    stop cyrus
    ctl_mboxlist -d -x > mailbox_list.txt
    add "improved_mboxlist_sort: 1" to /etc/imapd.conf
    ctl_mboxlist -u < mailbox_list.txt
    start cyrus

Or you could do:

    stop cyrus
    ctl_mboxlist -d > mailbox_list.txt
    mv $confdir/mailboxes.db $confdir/mailboxes.db.unsorted
    add "improved_mboxlist_sort: 1" to /etc/imapd.conf
    ctl_mboxlist -u < mailbox_list.txt
    start cyrus

 
> There is, however a comment on the man page which is confusing:
> 
>    -x     When performing a dump, remove the  mailboxes
>           dumped  from  the mailbox list (mostly useful
>           when specified with -p)
> 
> 
> Why is this flag mostly useful when specified with -p?  Don't I need to 
> remove the contents of the old mboxlist under any circumstances if I 
> plan to reload on the same machine, or will ctl_mboxlist dump the 
> contents automatically as soon as I execute a -u load?

Yeah, they're more thinking about killing off a partition to move to
another server or something in that piece of documentation.  It's always
dangerous to say "mostly useful for" when thinking of one use case for
a command, because there may be other use cases later...
 
> Finally, assuming this works and based on my experience, it seems that 
> the improved sorting system should just become the default in cyrus 
> 2.4.x, with the improved_mboxlist_sort deprecated and perhaps even 
> disabled.  Not being able to sort with "non-ascii" characters like -_ is 
> going to be counterintuitive to most people.

Absolutely.  The crappy thing is, upgrading automatically is hard.  I've
been thinking about this a fair bit, and I think we may need to add some
sort of "marker file" to your confdir on startup to say this has been
done, then automatically upgrade you.  Just for skiplist, it can probably
be done automatically by adding a flag field to the skiplist file header,
but what about flat databases?  I'll need to test.

Bron.