One users Inbox emails disappear from IMAP client but are still visible in /cur

[DigitalEssence]

Hi,

I have one user who's Inbox emails have "disappeared" for the second time from IMAP clients and webmail. The first time they "just came back" after a while. This time it has been 3 hours now and we still can't see the Inbox emails in any IMAP client or webmail.

Looking in their /cur directory I can see 3585 emails and can open and read any I select. They all have the correct permission:

-rw-r----- 1 username username

But don't show in any client or in webmail.

This user did go over quota yesterday but I have now increased their quota to see if that resolves it. Even if it does which it hasn't yet. They aren't the only customer who is incapable of ever deleting emails so it is odd it only happens for them.

Is there anything I can check to see why this happening or anyfurther information I can provide to help fault find?


Dovecot version: 2.3.8

Many thanks,

 

[cPanelLauren]

Is anything of note reported n the maillogs at /var/log/maillog for the user? Do you know if you're using maildir or mdbox for their mail? Maildir is the default and you may want to run the following if you're using it:

/scripts/remove_dovecot_index_files --user $USER

Which causes the dovecot index files to be regenerated

 

[techguide]

/scripts/remove_dovecot_index_files --user $USER

Which causes the dovecot index files to be regenerated

I am experiencing this exact issue on version v92.0.12. A cpanel account hit their total disk limit (and I do have alerts set that should have notified me and the client, and no emails are being sent, a different issue to troubleshoot). One user did exceed their mailbox limit at the same time in this same cpanel account. I Increased the disk space for the cpanel account, and increased the mailbox limit for the 1 user. And I did need to run /scripts/fixquotas to update the quotas, and then email for this cpanel account started sending/receiving again.

Now 3 other, unrelated email accounts in the same cpanel account are only displaying "new" emails in their inbox; although the /cur folder is still present and has many emails in it. 1 of the 3 email accounts resolved the issue on its own after 1 hour; former emails that were sitting in the inbox showed up and synced again.

However, 2 other email accounts are still not showing the former emails in /cur folder in the inbox; only new emails that have come in recently. This occurs in Outlook configured for IMAP and also on the user's phones; so not just an outlook client issue.

Has anyone tried the above script to confirm that it fixes this issue that the /cur directory emails are not showing up in the Inbox, and running this script won't cause any other issues? Thanks for any assistance.

 

[techguide]

Solution for this problem that worked for me~
I didn't want to use the cpanel script as it would reindex ALL mailboxes, and I was only have a problem with 2 mailboxes.
From root shell I ran the command

 doveadm force-resync -u [email protected] INBOX

And that fixed the specific user's mailbox so both new and /cur emails would appear in the user's inbox (phone, webmail, and outlook) now.