Cyrus: mailbox undeleteable - how to edit mailboxes.db

[Jan Kowalsky]

Hi all,

I've a problem with a mailbox which is undeletable. The reason is a
white space in the mailbox name like:

/user/givenname middlename.surname at example.org

It was created during migration because of a wrong transliteration of
recipient policy - as far as I understood (some missing locales).

I changed/deleted the user - but the folder still resides in cyrus and
isn't deletable neither with "kolab dm MAILBOX" nor with cyradm directly.

Since it causes some cyrus problems: recursive reconstruction fails with
segfault and error about a nonexistent mailbox, I'd like to get rid of it.

The only idea I got is to manipulate the mailboxes.db directly to delete
the entries and delete the related folders in filesystem.

I did it already on a copy of the productive system with success (as far
as I could see).

But I would like to be sure that it has no side effects. Can anybody
tell me if this is a reasonable approach?

What I did:

# stop cyrus
service cyrus-imapd stop

# convert sikplist db to flat file
/usr/lib/cyrus-imapd/cvt_cyrusdb /srv/imap/config/mailboxes.db \
    skiplist /root/tmp/mailboxes.db.txt flat

# deleted the lines of the related mailboxes
vi /root/tmp/mailboxes.db.txt flat

# converting back and copy to cyrus config dir
/usr/lib/cyrus-imapd/cvt_cyrusdb /root/tmp/mailboxes.db.txt \
    flat /root/tmp/mailboxes.db.new skiplist

cp /root/tmp/mailboxes.db.new /srv/imap/config/mailboxes.db
chown cyrus:mail /srv/imap/config/mailboxes.db
chmod 600 /srv/imap/config/mailboxes.db

# delete the related folders
rm -r PATHOFFOLDER

# reconstruct mailbox
/usr/lib/cyus-imapd/reconstruct

# start cyrus
service cyrus-imapd start

What do you think? Anything else to be done? Is it possible at all?

Thanks and Regards
Jan