Cyrus iMap problems

For those of us that have to administer email servers I’m sure you have had moments of “Why did I ever switch from my old email server” moments. Well, I have one of those last week and thought I would share what it took to fix the problem with hopes that it may help someone else keep from kicking their mail server to the curb.

It all stated when we had a user reach their quota. They had over 17gigs worth of emails in the Trash folder. Which basically made it almost impossible to empty. Deleting 50 emails at a time would take way to long and who has that kind of time. So I backed up the users email and issued a the following command:

rm -rf ./Trash

After a few minutes the cursor blinked back at me with the longing pulse of wanting another command.

This is were my problem came into play. My old email server was a custom build of the following:

• Linux From Scratch
• Qmail
• TMDA
• Spammassassin
• ClamAV

I ran a maildir folder system and while I had iMap cappabilities, we never used them. Every user was setup with simply POP3 accounts. So on my old system, removing a folder would have never been an issue because all mail was local to on each machine.

Long story short, once I removed the folder I logged into Horde and noticed that my recently deleted Trash folder was still there. What gives, I just deleted it right? Well why not just try and delete it via Horde. Well that resulted in ad Disk I/O error. After reading over the man pages and doing a little Google searching I realized that the cyrus.cache, cyrus.header and cyrus.index files were the cause of all my problems.

The said user had now been with out email for over an hour and a needed to get things back up and running. So I issued the following command:

su – cyrus -c “/usr/lib/cyrus/bin/reconstruct -r user/userName”

The basic breakdown is as follows:

su – cyrus -c: this changed us to the user cyrus and prepared to issue a command. This is needed or the permissions will be wrong on the newly created files and mail will not work.

/usr/lib/cyrus/bin/reconstruct -r: obviously the reconstruct command, but don’t forget to add the -r to go recursively into any sub folders the user may have created.

user/userName: this would tell the reconstruct program to work on a user named userName and recreate the needed files.

I once again checked Horde and all was right in the world of email once again.