OS X Server: recovering corrupted email account

Hey folks,

Urgent problem with OS X Server (aren’t they all?). A user’s e-mail account has become corrupted, big surprise. It seems that for months he has been unable to delete any e-mail with Entourage. When he tries, the application beach ball spins and spins and eventually must be force quit. I would tell him to try it in a different application, except he now has 8000 messages in his in-box so it literally takes hours to download all the headers, and Entourage has begun consistently crashing on him. Additionally–and I don’t know if this was a problem before I rebuilt the server mail data base yesterday–even logging in via Squirrelmail hangs up. It really looks like this account is hosed.

What I’ve done for the time being is given him and new e-mail account and am forwarding all his messages to that. However, he and I would like to be able to retrieve his old messages. Two problems occur to me:

1. What’s the best way to retrieve his e-mail without having to download all the headers for 5 hours, possibly even crashing the application used to do so?

2. Since his corrupted account is currently set to forward mail, I’m unable to log into it. Even though the mailbox files are still there, the server won’t allow logins again until I reenable the account’s mailbox. However, if I do so, any new e-mail he receives during this time will go into the corrupted box and be thereby irretrievable. Short of shutting down all inbound SMTP traffic for a bunch of hours, any thoughts on a good workaround while I try to resurrect these old bones?

I won’t ask what you think the best way to prevent this is, because I know the answer is to stop using Apple Mail Services.

Many thanks,

Noam