Re: Deleting "ghost" mailboxes that don't correspond to filesystem directories

On Tue, Mar 04, 2025 at 08:51:42PM +0100, Michael Menge wrote:
> Check for "space" at the end of the folder name. The columns are "tab"
> seperated.

Yes, a couple of them had trailing spaces (which I noticed and quoted
appropriately) but most of them didn't.

> Also you can try to use "reconstruct -r user.[redacted]" or
> "reconstruct -u [redacted]"

That produces "I/O error".

> === !!! WARNING USE WITH CAUTION !!! ====
> 
> If you are sure that the folder does not exist anymore on the file system
> and EVERTHING else failed you can try to remove the entries from the
> mailboxes.db.

Thanks for the instructions!  I think this is what I'll have to do, and
of course that will require a time when I can schedule downtime.

(I probably won't bother doing it on the old server but will just write
my tools to prune out known-bad folder names.  But this will be useful 
on the new server, and I can do it as part of the downtime when we cut
over.)

It would be nice if there were a command-line tool to fix the database when
it gets out of synch with reality like this (either a tool to remove a 
specific mailbox database entry, or a tool to find mailboxes know to the
database that don't correspond to a folder in the the filesystem and ask
what to do about them).

Better yet would be if cyradm's deletemailbox command just worked in this
case (perhaps if given an "-f" flag or after a warning and confirmation).


> #stop cyrus
> #create backup of your mailboxes.db
> ctl_mboxlist -d > /tmp/mboxlist
> vi /tmp/mboxlist
> ctl_mboxlist -u < /tmp/mboxlist
> # Limit access to cyrus e.g. via firewall so that you can test
> # if cyrus is running without any problem and nobody is creating/deleting
> folder
> # or changing acls, so that you can use your backup of your mailboxes.db in
> case
> # somthing went wrong
> start cyrus

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