MIX conversion woes

By the way, I was unable to find a reference to mixcvt in the 
documentation or code for imap-uw 2007e.   I sure wish I had known about 
it before I tried someone else's conversion program.

But anway, the current situation is that I first converted all of my 
mail files (quite a few and some pushing 1.5GB).  I used them for a week 
or so and noticed no problems.   Then I converted nearly half our 
users.   I started getting reports of what others have reported here, 
that on the order of half the messages get marked as unread that 
previously were read.   In one case, I did the conversion, put the mix 
directory in my mail folders and confirmed it had 150 or so unread 
messages.  A few days later the user complained it had 6000+ messages.

Needless to say, the users affected are rather unhappy with me.   Email 
is their lifeblood.

I've seen various complaints about this problem mostly back in 2007 
(which then led me to mixcvt).   But I never saw what caused the problem.

Of course I have the original files (but it has been 2 weeks).   I could 
do something rather ugly by re-converting the original files with 
mixcvt, then running a imap program that finds the differences with the 
current folder (deleting messages that have since been deleted, and 
copying over messages to the newly converted file that are new in the 
folder).

But I'm not sure that will be effective.   The main issue is that I 
don't understand why this change in read status happens, and whether 
other things get screwed up too.  I'm guessing something is happening 
from what I believe Mark has termed the self-repair of the mix format.

What gets me is that I can't understand what is wrong (if anything) with 
the mix formats that I created.   They were created and appended by 
mailutil (2007e) from intermediate files.  I can believe the 
intermediate files might have something wrong, but still I'd expect 
mailutil to create a consistent mix folder.

The other possibility is that imapd (2006c) is the cause of this.   (As 
you may recall from an earlier note, when we tried to move up to 2007e, 
our system got swamped and so we backed down.)  If this is it, then 
changing the files again won't help.

Can anyone clue me in?


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