folder left after dm user.mailboxname, remove by rm ?

[Eric Luyten]

On 05/02/2019 18:08, Marcus Schopen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've deleted an unused mailbox "dm user.emil" and cleaned up DELETED
> with 'su - cyrus -c "/usr/sbin/cyrus expire -E 1 -X 0 -D 0 -v -p
> DELETED.user.emil'.
>
> /var/spool/cyrus/mail/u/DELETED/user is empty now and
> "su - cyrus -c "/usr/sbin/ctl_mboxlist -d" | grep -i emil" doesn't show
> any user.emil mailboxes anymore.
>
> Nevertheless there is one single folder left on the master in
>
>   /var/spool/cyrus/mail/e/user/emil/team/
>
> which contains some messages and cyrus.cache, cyrus.header,
> cyrus.header files. So this must have been a normal folder once.
>
> If I understood that correctly, Cyrus doesn't know about the folder
> anymore because the dump with "ctl_mboxlist -d" shows that the user has
> been removed completely, no user.email folders are left in the dump
> output.
>
> Can I remove that folder securely just by
>
>    rm -rf /var/spool/cyrus/mail/e/user/emil/
>
> The following question would be, why the folder was not available in
> the cyrus database. But since the user is deleted anyway, this would
> not be my primary problem, especially since the user had worked with
> Outlook and had hamstered about 11 GB and 1200 folders in his mailbox.
>

Hello Marcus,



I do not know what Cyrus version you are running but very occasionally, 
on a 2.3 system, I witness the same phenomenon.

To give you an idea : this happens on average once every thousand (or 
so) account removals.

If Cyrus doesn't know about the directory through mailboxes.db it is 
never going to remove it by itself.



Cheers,

Eric Luyten.