I've been seeing these messages in my email error logs lately

SQUAT failed to open index file
SQUAT failed

and being curious I looked around and found a program called "squatter" that apparently does the following :

Squatter creates a new SQUAT index for one or more IMAP mailboxes. The SQUAT index is a unified index of all of the header and body text of each message a given mailbox. This

index is used to significantly reduce IMAP SEARCH times on a mailbox.

Squatter creates an index of ALL messages in the mailbox, not just those since the last time that it was run (i.e., it does NOT do incremental updates). Any messages appended to

the mailbox after squatter is run, will NOT be included in the index. To include new messages in the index, squatter must be run again. For large and active mailboxes, it is rec-

ommended to run squatter periodically as an EVENT in cyrus.conf(5)

NOTE: Messages and mailboxes that have not been indexed CAN still be SEARCHed, just not as quickly as those with a SQUAT index.

Squatter reads its configuration options out of the imapd.conf(5) file unless specified otherwise by -C.

And so it turn out that the following command will rebuild these indexes :
sudo -u cyrusimap /usr/bin/cyrus/bin/squatter -v

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