using mailbox to recover after a disk failure?

Hi

We just recovered from a system failure, where we couldn't see the
attached drive array that houses all user homes.  It took us
approximately one week to find a solution to this (kernel patch
overwrote a SCSI driver - it's a Sun v880, Solaris 9.  Reapplying the
SCSI driver fixed the problem).  Our system runs postfix, and serves
~1800 users for email.

During this week, we got up some temp homes, and allowed users to
continue to email, etc.

Now, we have everything back and we're left with trying to update the
mailboxes in the original homes with the mail sent/received during the
last week using the new homes.

My question is, can this be done with Mail::Box?  Are there any
example scripts to synchronize two mbox's?

My original plan was to use the messageId for each message as a key in
a hash to track "seen messages".  Then, work through each mbox in a
user's mail folder and check if the mbox contains messages that are not
present in the week old mbox's.  If it does, then attach these new
messages to the original mbox.  There are problems with this approach
for sent-mail* mbox's and INBOX.(Sent|Draft), obviously, and for these
I have also been thinking about using the "From " line (not the "From: "
line!) as a key.  However, I can't figure out how to access this
line (and maybe it doesn't make sense to in the first place).

Anyone tried to do this before?  Or have a better way to do it?  Is
there anything I need to be careful with or watch out for?

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks
BCT
____________________________
Brian C. Thomas
Sysadmin for Nature
CNR, UC-Berkeley

[email protected]