Everyone’s INBOX should be restored.  There were two customers whose INBOX was not just moved to a BOGUS file and I had to restore your e-mail from backups made on the 23rd.  I will e-mail you individually.

For those who are interested in what technically went wrong, NFS version 4 uses a program called idmapd to map username to UID across an NFS connection so that files owned by a user on a server are owned by the same user on a client machine.

Until recently this daemon was able to determine the correct domain on it’s own, however, with a recent update, unless it was configured in /etc/idmapd.conf, it didn’t know what domain it belonged to and id mapping broke down.

The mail software, if it doesn’t know who a file belongs to, won’t append or otherwise modify it, instead it moves it to BOGUS.filename.xxxx where xxxx are four characters.  When id mapping went away, as either mail came in or people accessed mail with pop-3 or imapd, or from the shell server, or webmail, when that program attempted to modify your INBOX and couldn’t determine who owned it, it moved it to BOGUS.filename.xxxx and started a new box.

About 160 accounts got affected this way.  To correct this I had to take all the BOGUS files, put them back together into one spool file in the correct order and owing to the random characters, I couldn’t easily script it and had to do by hand which is why it took so long.

I apologize for this interruption.  I’m sure there was probably a note associated with one of these updates, the problem is there were between 300-900 updates to apply per server so no way I could read all that.