On Aug 26, 2012, at 3:24 PM, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
It is possible to rescue Date for most messages, and it may be possible to do something about Message-Id. I don't have the details to hand tonight.
Cool! When you get a chance, I'd love to have those details.
What was bad about the backups?
A whole series of things, as one might guess, boiling down to 'negligence'. This is freebsd; I was depending on the periodic-daily script to dump all the databases; keeping 10 days of these. The daily script sends mail with status... the status of the database dump task is (hidden) down at the bottom. I wasn't reading all the way to the bottom, because it includes the output of mailq -- which always has a few pages of of noise. (I do religiously read it and look at the status of gmirror, to ensure that both disk mirrors are happy...) Thus, I didn't know that the dump of archiveopteryx was having trouble every day. (Still don't know the reason for that. Perhaps there was some pre-existing corruption. The other databases are all fine.) Hence, I had 10 days of zero-length dumps.. and copies of those on a different machine, even.
I'm adding a script to check that they're "reasonable" before rotating them out, and to complain when they're not. And I will now read all the way to the bottom of that bit of mail!
Anything there ought to be an aox command to help check?
a whack-me-on-the-head-for-being-dumb command is probably appropriate; can you write that? I can't think of anything else that's needed. :)
I'm planning to copy all the old mail (from the corrupted instance) into the new instance, to ensure that it has as much integrity as possible. I assume I should use imap to do so? (the new one already has new mail in it... ) Do you still like imapsync best for this sort of task?
