Dovecot ‘mdbox’ Format Maintenance

I ran into a wierd situation the other day when setting up Dovecot dsync replication over TCP where the new host I was syncing too, had finished syncing but the directory size differed between both hosts. After a bit of investigation, I found this was a quirk of sorts in how the mdbox format works.

mdbox stores messages even after they are completely deleted and expunged. This is done by decremented a variable called refcount on the message and when there is finally no more references for it, the value should be set to 0. Even after this though, the message is still stored in the file. When syncing however over dsync, these messages are not replicated as it is specific to the file format.

Apparently, during quiet periods of the day, it is recommended to schedule a maintenance command via cron for purging these messages completely. This can be done as follows:

# To purge a single user's mails where refcount=0
doveadm purge -u <user>

# To purge all users' mails where refcount=0
doveadm purge -A

For the latter to succeed, doveadm user '*' must successfully return all the correct usernames for deletion. This of course is now running on both hosts as a nightly cron job to keep things tidy.