Last thursday yum completely wiped my server :-(. Luckily this happened the day after i got back from my holiday... but: backup hadn't run in 2 weeks (it couldn't send the data to my house). So i used CentOS live CD to backup the home folders to a windows laptop. I reinstalled the server and copied the home folders back (all this without tarring them or anything, just a plain copy) I gave them rights. the user has 700 on the maildir, and is owner. Now here is the problem: Whenever i try and access the mails in the directory, i get a list saying '(no subject)'. A few messages do have a subject, sender and dat information. Bu cannot be opened. This is the same with clients (thunderbird and outlook) as with Roundcube and the webmin mailbox peeking tool. I suspect the NTFT filesystem has broke the message tree. I have been fiddling with access rights and stuff for a while, but i suspect the index is broken or something. Anyone any ideas on how to fix this.
and the answer is... well, i figured it out. when i copied the messages to the windows machine, all the email messages got reduced to 0 bytes. i guess that was some security thing or something. At this point, dovecot thinks they are still there, because the files exist. Since the files (messages) are 0 bytes. There is no content and trying to open them will result in an error. Shame on me for loosing my user's mail messages So, a warning for all of us: when your server has crashed, test your backup before wiping the server. You may need to try and rescue more data.
