[courier-users] Question restoring messages from backup, courierimapuiddb

[Richard R. <ra...@li...>]

Hello,

I set up a courier-imap mailserver with a Maildir structure, with rsync
for creating regular backups on a remote machine. But I'm running into a
problem testing this backup method; here's what I did:
- I cc'd a hundred or so messages to the Inbox of a test account
- I created a backup of this test account
- I deleted half the messages in this Inbox (using MUA)
- I created another backup
- I restored all backed-up messages to ~/Maildir/cur/
- I renamed ("safe removed") ~/Maildir/courierimapuiddb, expecting
courier-imap to rebuild the correct list from the restored files found
in ~/Maildir/cur.

This is where things go wrong. When I connect using a mail client, I get
error messages "NO Cannot open message" (Squirrelmail) for all deleted
messages, and only the ones I didn't delete originally are still shown
correctly. Evolution doesn't show messages at all, and just says "Error
while refreshing folder".

AFAICS, the number of lines in courierimapuiddb matches the number of
files in ~/Maildir/cur, so that part of restoring the Maildir structure
seems to have worked. Yet obviously I have to do something else to
restore the deleted messages -- and I can't use a backup of
courierimapuiddb of course, since this backup doesn't reflect all the
files backed up over time with rsync.

So what am I doing wrong? Is there a special command to restore the
Maildir structure with courimapuiddb and other files from a bunch of
message files?

Thanks in advance, best regards,

Richard Rasker