E-mails not showing up after using reconstruct

[Matt Wynne]

Had a situation recently where, after a cyrus db error, using reconstruct to repair the db, left many users with the all their folders buit with apparently no e-mails in them.

A quick check of the relavent folders on the server confirmed that all the e-mail was there, just that Mail couldn’t see it. We then tried Entourage – it saw the correct number of e-mails, but would not pull them down from the server.

In both cases these were newly created accounts in both apps – so no local caching problems. We had a look using Thunderbird and it had no problem accesing the folders and e-mails! The only way we found to get Mail/Entourage to play ball was to use WebMail to move the e-mails into their own folder (I know it sounds ridiculous but it works!) and then they show up.

We checked what changed when we did this – and as expected the only items that changed were cyrus.index and cyrus.cache in the relevant folder. Now I’m puzzled as we tried an experiment – we deleted the .cache & .index files from another folder that wasn’t working properly and then ran reconstruct on that mailbox again. It duly created the 2 files but the same thing, no files. So where was it pulling the cache information from, as I’m guessing that’s the problem?

If anyone can enlighten me as to what Thunderbird does differently with IMAP mail that Mail & Entourage don’t I’d be very grateful.

[Anonymous]

I have the same experience, see:

https://www.afp548.com/forum/viewtopic.php?forum=26&showtopic=7459

[Anonymous]

There’s a discussion on the Apple support site lists about imap and reconstruct problems. One poster gives a very detailed description about how it sets a date to an invalid amount. Mail uses the item, Thunderbird doesn’t. I’m afraid I’m too tired at the moment to search for the references. It’s under Mac OSX Server and imap mail and it’s pretty recent.

HTH, and let’s all hope for 10.4.1 Server soon!

[Matt Wynne]

V.Tired – thanks for the heads up. Basically it appears that Apple recompiled the reconstruct utility to include the -i switch not only to enable the import into mailboxes.db in a repair situationsbut ALSO in the once-only time migration from AMS! The IMAP flag INTERNALDATE gets set to 0, which is never correct, and would cause an error with any mail client that asked for it. Thunderbird, however, seems unique amongst most mainstream IMAP clients in not asking for this flag, hence no problem! A chap from Brighton – James Goodlet – has recompiled versions for 10.3.9 and 10.4 to stop/fix the problem happening.

Thread at Apple Discussion here

Link to James’ recompiled version of reconstruct here and more instructions here

UPDATED – John Thompson has put an article on the front page (if like me you came straight here you might have missed it!) go to it here

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