[exim] mail caught between exim.in and delivery

Hi all,

today I navigated myself into a strange situation and I don't know how to get out of it:

last night I did an update on my server (FC4, using yum update) and for some mysterious reason it updated the exim executable in /usr/sbin and made me (harro.harro) the owner! I didn't realise this until this morning when I wasn't getting mails and the exim logs stated there was a problem changing GID and UID. After I found the problem mail delivery returned to its normal state.

However, during the time that exim could not become root (and therefore could not deliver emails to the mailboxes), the emails remained in /var/spool/exim/input. I use MailScanner, so I have an /var/spool/exim.in/input folder where mail is delivered first, before being scanned, then it is dropped into /var/spool/exim/input and from there somehow they are delivered to the mailboxes. I use Dovecot as the 'other' mailprogram (I am not really sure what to call it's function).

My question: how do I get the 50 or so emails that are waiting in the /var/spool/exim/input folder delivered to the mailboxes?

- I tried to copy them back to /var/spool/exim.in/input - they disappear again but are not delivered.
- I also tried to get exim to restart its queue (exim -M <email id>), but since the emails are not in the /exim.in/ folder, they are not recognised as being in the queue (they have passed through already).
- I looked at the exim database, but it only showed mails that were not being delivered to other smtp servers.

I don't understand how to start the last step again manually.

I greatly appreciate any thoughts on this,

Harro
(The Netherlands)