If you run mail services on OS X Server 10.4 using the built-in "Apple supplied" software, you know there can be headaches. Apple's advice, beginning with Tiger, is to repair the mailstore and individual user mail accounts using Server Admin. In my experience, rebuilding a user's mailstore using Server Admin simply doesn't work. Instead, use this from a shell:
sudo -u cyrusimap /usr/bin/cyrus/bin/reconstruct -r -f user/shortname
...where "shortname" is the user's short name. Bear in mind that this assumes you've left things in their default state (you haven't added mail partitions, mucked with imapd.conf, etc).
Nicely, you don't even have to shut down mail services to rebuild a single account. While mail services in Tiger, and specifically, 10.4.5 and higher, are much improved over Panther, keep this on-liner handy: you're going to need it from time-to-time!
We had a similar problem and
We had a similar problem and one of the guys I worked with fixed it but still I wanted to know how it's done. Your solution really works and I need to thank you for taking the time to post it. This domain never ends to come up with new problems every day. Luckily for me there are some people like you that know it all!
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Mary-Anne Davis, Arizona Web Design affiliate.