DOVEADM-FORCE-RESYNC(1)

✨ DOVEADM-FORCE-RESYNC(1) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the Dovecot manual page for doveadm-force-resync — the little command that fixes your broken mailboxes when nothing else will 🫶 it lives in the Dovecot manual, section 1, and it is genuinely your best friend when things go sideways.

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💖 NAME 💖

doveadm-force-resync — Repair broken mailboxes 🛠️✨

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

doveadm [GLOBAL OPTIONS] force-resync [-S socket_path] -A mailbox

doveadm [GLOBAL OPTIONS] force-resync [-S socket_path] -F file mailbox

doveadm [GLOBAL OPTIONS] force-resync [-S socket_path] --no-userdb-lookup mailbox

doveadm [GLOBAL OPTIONS] force-resync [-S socket_path] -u user mailbox

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so like, under certain circumstances — and you know the universe loves those — dovecot(1) just cannot fix your mailbox problems on its own. auto-solving said no. that's when force-resync swoops in like the main character 💅

it tries to fix all problems. all of them. every single one. and for sdbox and mdbox mailboxes, the storage files will also be checked 👑

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🌈 GLOBAL OPTIONS 🌈

these are the global doveadm(1) options, shared with all its siblings:

• -D — turns on verbosity and debug messages 🐛✨
• -O — do not read any config file, just use defaults. the dovecot_storage_version setting defaults to the latest version, but you can override it with -o.
• -k — preserve the entire environment for doveadm, not just the import_environment setting.
• -v — enables verbosity, including the progress counter 📊 (satisfying, ngl)
• -i instance-name — if you're running multiple Dovecot instances, pick the config file based on this instance name. see the instance_name setting for more info 🫶
• -c config-file — read configuration from the given config-file. by default it first reads the config socket, then falls back to /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf. you can also point this at the config socket of some instance running a compatible version 👀
• -o setting=value — overrides the configuration setting from /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf and from the userdb with the given value. to override multiple settings, you can specify -o multiple times. stack 'em. go off.

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -A — if -A is present, the command runs for all users. using this with system users from userdb { driver = passwd } is not recommended, because it also contains users with a lower UID than the one configured with the first_valid_uid setting. 🙈

when the SQL userdb module is used, make sure the userdb_sql_iterate_query setting setting matches your database layout.

when using the LDAP userdb module, make sure the userdb_fields setting and userdb_ldap_iterate_fields setting settings match your LDAP schema. otherwise doveadm(1) will be unable to iterate over all users 😭

• -F file — run the command for all the users in the file. it's basically -A's cousin, except instead of getting the user list from the userdb, they're read from the given file. the file contains one username per line 📄
• --no-userdb-lookup — do not perform a userdb lookup. use the USER environment variable to specify the username 🏷️
• -S socket_path — the argument is either an absolute path to a local UNIX domain socket, or a hostname and port (hostname:port), so you can connect to a remote host via a TCP socket 🌐

this lets an administrator execute doveadm(1) mail commands through the given socket.

• -u user/mask — run the command only for the given user. you can also use '*' and '?' wildcards (e.g. -u *@example.org) 🎯

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🍓 ARGUMENTS 🍓

• mailbox — the name of the mailbox to fix. with mdbox all of the mailboxes are fixed, so you can use for example INBOX as the name 💌

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⭐ EXAMPLE ⭐

fix bob's INBOX:

doveadm force-resync -u bob INBOX

bob is healed. we love that for him 💖

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💀 REPORTING BUGS 💀

report bugs, including doveconf -n output, to the Dovecot Mailing List ⟨dovecot@dovecot.org⟩. info about reporting bugs is available at: ⟨https://dovecot.org/bugreport.html⟩

(ngl, always include that doveconf -n output. it's giving prepared. it's giving helpful. the devs will thank you 🙏)

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• doveadm(1)

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and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 this one came from the Dovecot source, version f979264, dated April 2026 — so you're reading the freshest possible tea ✨ slay, go fix those mailboxes, and remember: every problem can be resynced 💅🦋