reconstruct/rebuild

Thanks for the reply.

I have downloaded mailbfr and will have a good look. But a cursory glance indicates that it rebuilds mailbox indexes and that is not what I need as I believe they are all correct. My problem is that the mailboxes.db file is not correct. It still lists mailboxes in locations where they no longer exist. If I run 'reconstruct -i', it recreates all those mailboxes again (but with nothing in them).

I really want to start from scratch and somehow build a new mailboxes.db as an accurate list of the mailboxes that really do exist (and contain all the mail), such that the client can them see them when connecting to the server. It seems to me that this is what would be required when recovering a saved mail store and then needing to tell the server to USE THAT and forget about everything else.

Can mailbfr build a new mailboxes.db? How is a Leopard Server admin supposed to do this without resorting to third party products?

Can someone perhaps explain what the following is in mailbfr.

-f | --fixdb
Fix the mail database.

-m | --fixmailbox username
Fix a single mailbox/user.

I assume the latter is to rebuild individual mailbox indexes whereas the former seems to imply mailboxes.db will be rebuilt. However, having run it, all the mailboxes have been edited, but mailboxes.db is UNCHANGED:-(

In any case all the mailboxes are now visible in the client, but the Received date on all messages is the same so I have no idea when any message was received. This is a complete mess. All I wanted was to build a new mailboxes.db? I can't understand why this seems so impossible to achieve. What is mailboxes.db built from? How come mailbfr didn't touch it? I need to understand so that when I start all over again I know how to avoid Cyrus screwing me up again.

Since I was actually In the var/imap directory at the time it was not immediately apparent that it had been renamed and a new imap directory created with the new files which I can now see are ideed new.

However, what exactly does mailbfr -f do? Does it ONLY re-build mailboxes.db or does it also rebuild the mailbox indices (like mailbfr -m)? I'm copying all the mail over again since the received dates are all hosed in the rebuilt mailboxes and I don't want to have to do that again. Can I rebuild mailboxes.db without losing received date? Isn't there some way to be able to rebuild mailboxes and keep stuff like received date, it's in the actual message is it not, so it's not rocket science to ensure that rebuilding mailbox info doesn't trash important info like that? I don't know about anyone else, but that seems pretty crucial to me. I take your point about using sent date, but it's not the same and that's the point.

I understand your position and am very grateful for the help. It's just that setting up Leopard Server has been a nightmare every step of the way, when I chose to use it as a simpler (i.e. quicker) alternative to Linux (and I wanted to keep everything Mac) It would have been MUCH quicker for me to stick with Linux.

Having got the server running I needed to move all the mail from the old Linux server (mbox format) to the new Leopard Server (Cyrus, as we know) and that has taken DAYS. After first copying the messages I found that the account with the largest amount of mail (hundreds of folders in a heirarchical sructure) had somehow been 'edited' by the system (server? client?) to change the IMAP path prefix, so all the mail was in the wrong place. This was done after the prefix was correctly set and it then occurred with another account. I am not imagining this. To avoid having to repeat the whole process I moved the mail to where it should be and then needed to rebuild JUST mailboxes.db so that the mail could be seen in its new location by the client (OSX's Mail).

First of all, it seemed incredible to me that the system could not automatically detect the mail in the new location. On the Linux servers, this was such a simple process. Move the mail then change the IMAP path prefix in the client and bingo, there it all was. Cyrus is SERIOUSLY deficient in this regard. It then transpired that the only way to rebuild mailboxes.db involved rebuilding the mailbox indexes and not only is ALL mail then 'Unread', it has lost the 'Received' date and this is an unacceptable situation when thousands of messages are stored in that very precise order. So I had to start all over again and move all the messages again. This has taken DAYS and I can assure you I am far from happy with Apple at this moment in time. The product is far from finished with other serious issues and the documentation HOPELESS. It simply paraphrases the bleeding obvious or what is stated on the screen. USELESS.

It is finally running now and I thank you for your help - I am mad at Apple (Someone needs shooting), not yourself.

Finally, where is the 'Received' date taken from? It is not taken from the filesystem, so however I copied the mail made no difference. It is the effect of reconstructing the mailboxes that causes it, but is it not possible for the date to be retained, or simply extracted from a message header so it is not lost? Recovering from a backup should re-create everything exactly as it was and the 'Received' date of email is an indispensable piece of information, possibly more so than for any other type of data. Now if mailbfr could do that....:-)