Help! Mailbox sub-folder with one foot in the grave

[morgant]

I’ve got a folder in a user’s mailbox that can not be renamed or deleted because it “doesn’t exist”. This is on Mac OS X Server 10.4.3 using the standard Mail services.

A bit of background: basically, they wanted Mail from another account that was being decommissioned moved into the folder so I did the transfer by drag-and-drop in Mail.app. I didn’t notice that they had already created the folder (I dropped the entire folder) and that it differed by case. Mail accepted it without warning.

It was copied from a server running U of Washington’s IMAP and for some reason cyrus accepted having two folders with the same name, but different of case. When I deleted the duplicate folder (also using Mail.app) it said it succeeded, but I get the following error when trying to delete or rename the remaining copy of the folder:

IMAP command "DELETE" failed.
The server error encountered was: System I/O error

I peeked at /var/imap/users/x/xxxxxxxx.sub and the folder is not listed there.

I used Server Admin to do a “Repair” on the database and then to “Reconstruct” the account, but that didn’t provide any different results.

I then used Mail.app to create another copy of the folder (with the alternate case that I had deleted initially) and it then allowed me to delete the other copy. I was able to rename the folder by adding to the name (it wouldn’t let me do a straight case change), but it’s grayed out in Mail.app (although I can drag and drop mail messages into it and even view it on other workstations).

It’s still a no-show in the .sub file and I can’t delete it.

Any suggestions? In the meantime I’ll be reading through the cyradm documentation to see if I can come up with a solution.

[jgordonc]

I have had similar problems. If your email client saves IMAP mail, maybe removing the folder in mailbox in ~/library/Preferences/Mail might help?

Alternatively you can just cheat. Create a mailbox stored on your mac. Transfer all mail and recreate subfolders to it. Then remove the mail account and recreate it and just transfer everything back. I ended up doing that to save time.

[morgant]

Hmmm, not a bad idea.

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