mailboxes.db vs IMAP client irregularities

[Stephen Ingram]

On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 10:58 AM, Patrick Boutilier
<boutilpj at ednet.ns.ca> wrote:
> On 05/19/2012 01:51 PM, Stephen Ingram wrote:
>>
>> I'm running 2.4.13 from the invoca rpms on CentOS 5.8. I recently had
>> an issue with a folder in a mailbox that would not show any
>> subfolders. I created a new folder 'folder2' and moved all of the
>> subfolders to it and then performed a reconstruct on the new set of
>> folders and everything worked. Now I deleted the old folder 'folder'
>> from the file system and then (after it wouldn't go away from the
>> cyradm listing) used cyr_dbtool to manually remove it (and the
>> subfolders) from the mailboxes.db file. The old folders and subfolders
>> are now gone, however, I can't (using the IMAP client) rename
>> 'folder2' back to 'folder' as when I do, the subfolders are not
>> visible.
>>
>> I've dumped the mailboxes.db file to a flat file to look and see if
>> there is anything in there that wasn't visible in cyradm or using
>> cyr_dbtool show. Everything is as expected except there are some
>> DELETED.user.xxx.folder entries at the top. Are you not allowed the
>> create folders with the same name you've just deleted? Where are these
>> DELETED folders actually stored and how long does it take them to go
>> away? (I'm not using delayed expunge.)
>
>
> Sounds like you are using delayed delete. Mine show up in
> /imap/mail/C/DELETED/  . How long they stay around depends on when you run
> cyr_expire and what parameters you give it.
>
>
> Man page entries:
>
> deletedprefix: DELETED
>            If  "delete_mode"  set  to  be  "delayed",  the  prefix for the
> deleted mailboxes hierarchy.  The hierarchy delimiter will be automatically
> appended.
>
> delete_mode: immediate
>            The manner in which mailboxes are deleted. "immediate" mode is
> the default  behavior  in  which  mailboxes  are  removed immediately.   In
> "delayed" mode, mailboxes are renamed to a special hiearchy defined by the
> "deletedprefix" option to be removed later by cyr_expire.
>
>            Allowed values: immediate, delayed

I don't have any entry in imapd.conf for delete_mode so I'm thinking
that it's using the default of immediate. I did check the file system
again and I can't find those DELETED folders anywhere, so I'm guessing
that mailboxes.db is just wrong probably because of some bug. At your
suggestion, I checked cyr_expire and it is set to 3 days, so perhaps
that's my issue. Maybe those entries in mailboxes.db will go away on
their own after 3 days. I think I might wait just out of curiosity and
then upgrade to 2.4.16 to see if these mailbox naming issue (bug
2685?) is solved.

I wonder if there is any harm in removing those DELETED entries in
mailboxes.db if I can't find them anywhere in the file system?

Steve