sync_clients bails out - failed to order folders correctly

[ellie timoney]

Hi Konrad,

> do_folders: failed to order folders correctly

Do you have "improved_mboxlist_sort" enabled in your imapd.conf?  My guess is you don't.

> every time on a specific mailbox of a specific user.

It sounds like this user has two mailboxes where one is an exact substring of another, and the difference starts with a  character earlier than your hierarchy separator in ascii order (space and hyphen are the usual culprits).  e.g. Something like this can cause a variety of problems:

user.ellie.foo
user.ellie.foo-etc
user.ellie.foo.bar

Note the "-" sorts earlier than the hierarchy separator, and so even though "bar" is a child of "foo" and should be processed right after "foo", "foo-etc" sorts earlier than it and gets in the way...

I guess if this only started happening in the last days, then one of these folders must have been created recently.

If this is the cause, the quick workaround is to find the offending folder pair and ask the user to rename one of them.  They could replace the space or hyphen with an underscore ("_") and this will be fine.

The proper fix is to turn on "improved_mboxlist_sort", but note that the documentation says this SHOULD NOT be turned on on a live system, and provides instructions for converting the mailboxes.db and subscription databases with the service down.  I believe the most up to date documentation for this process is here:
https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/developer/thoughts/improved_mboxlist_sort.html

Hope this helps,

ellie

On Wed, 30 Sep 2020, at 11:03 PM, Konrad Mauz wrote:
> Hello list,
> 
> I had a working replication between to cyrus 3.0 servers running.
> 
> The sync_client is started once a day.
> 
> In the last days the sync_client bails out with 
> 
> do_folders: failed to order folders correctly
> 
> every time on a  specific mailbox of a specific user.
> 
> I can't see that there is a problem with the mailbox ( cyr_expire and 
> squatter are running correctly ).
> 
> How can I get the sync_client work again?
> 
> thanks in advance and kind regards,
> 
> Konrad
> -- 
> Konrad Mauz - Rechenzentrum HTWG Konstanz
> Tel: +497531206472 - Fax: +497531206153
> E-Mail: kmauz at htwg-konstanz.de
> Web: http://www.htwg-konstanz.de/rz.html
> 
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