A very frustrating day today. Mid-morning my email disappeared. Gone. Several thousands of messages vanished. After a day filled with false starts and several (unnecessary) rebuilds of Cyrus, it turns out to be a problem with the IMAP server on Mac OS X Server 10.3.9. Possibly earlier versions as well. The result is that when a user logs in using Mail or Entourage the Cyrus process is killed with the message "exited, signaled to death by 6".

Several sites, including the Apple discussion boards, suggest a problem with the LDAP implementation of 10.3.9. So far no dice. More tomorrow and webmail in the mean time.