Want to rebuild mailbox from client cache...how?

Question

My System:
Xserve G5, 5GB RAM, 2 x 2Ghz Dual core xeons, Mac Os x Server 10.5.1 (build 9B18).
The Issue:
One of my users reported that he can't log in, For no apparent reason, the directory administrator was denied access to change the password, SO I deleted the user, re-created the same user with the same secondary mail partition (i am using a separate drive for the mail store location, the mail db as well as a secondary partition) All mail is stored on the secondary partition (/Volumes/mail/secondarypartition).
Now when the re-created user logged in, he couldn't see any of his previous mail. His mail store location was also wiped clean. He does have a cache on the lab machine. I have to reconstruct his old mailbox from his local cache on the lab machine... could any one guide me as to how I go about this?

Answer 1

I have a crude but effective solution after poking around at the contents of the mail cache. First of all make a backup of the IMAP folder (~/Library/Mail/IMAP-user@domain).
Then (with Mail off, although I don't think it makes any difference),copy the entire IMAP cache folder to the ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes folder which is the local mailbox store.
Then you need to rename all of the imapmbox folder to become plain old mbox folders. Pick your method as you see fit. I just did a:
find . | grep imapmbox$ > fixnames.sh
And then a couple of cleanup routines to produce the rename commands.
Once you have that, you can start Mail up and you'll see a new local folder containing your old IMAP hierarchy. But we're not there yet. You now need to go folder by folder and choose Mailbox > Rebuild on each one.
I did poke around in the Applescript dictionary but it would appear that's not a command exposed to the Applescript API (which is too bad since I have a lot of folders here...).
The last step would be copying all of that back up to the IMAP server.
Best of luck!