[Dovecot] Advice on converting from Mbox to Maildir?

[Villalovos, John L]

To recap what I have learned :)

dovecot-bounces at dovecot.org wrote:
> Does anyone have advice or pointers on good documentation on how to
> convert a system from using the Mbox format to using Maildir?
> 
> I recently upgraded to Fedora Core 2 from Fedora Core 1 and discovered
> that UW-IMAP was gone.  So I switched over to using Dovecot.
> So far so
> good.
> 
> But I would like to convert my system to start using the
> Maildir format.
> 
> How easy is this to accomplish?

Fairly easy on the small system I had.  I only have around 8 people
using email off of my system.

> Can I keep my Inbox /var/spool/mail/user_name as an mbox
> format and have
> my other folders as Maildir?

Timo says that it is NOT available in the version that comes with Fedora
Core 2.  It will be available in the 1.0 series by defining multiple
namespaces.  The current 1.0-tests allow this.


> What would I have to change for Sendmail to make it use
> Maildir for the Inbox?

Sendmail does NOT need to be changed.

> Can procmail support Maildir?

Yes and that is what you need to change.

I setup /etc/procmailrc to have the line:

DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/

Make sure there is the terminating / on that line.

What this will do is make all new mail that is delivered via procmail go
to each user's Maildir folder.

But what you need to do first is convert your existing mbox mail into
maildir format.  I used the program that was recommended to me: mb2md

http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/

This program worked great to convert my /var/spool/mail/user_name stuff
and also folders that I had created under ~/mail/

So now my whole system is using Maildir format.

If you had a big system this might be a big pain :(

John

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