[Dovecot] migration to maildir and arrival time

[Nicolas Kowalski]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> On 21.10.2004, at 14:18, Nicolas Kowalski wrote:
>
>>  I have noticed that when I use the mailutil tool from uw-imap distribution 
>>  to transfer my IMAP mailboxes from our current server (uw-imap, mbx 
>>  format) to the dovecot one, the mails arrival time are apparently lost. I 
>>  can see this in Pine, using the Arrival sort: the mailboxes on the 
>>  originating server and dovecot server are not ordered the same. If I use 
>>  the mb2md perl script to transfer the same mailbox, I see the same 
>>  behaviour.
>> 
>>  Is this normal ?
>
> Dovecot gets the arrival time from maildir file's modification timestamp. If 
> your scripts don't set that correctly, that's the problem.

My script just uses the mailutil tool, which sets the arrival correctly 
AFAIK. When manually using pine to copy from the source server to the 
dovecot+maildir server, I see the same behaviour: the resulting mailbox 
looks like reversed (last messages received displayed first in pine).

For example, I use this:

mailutil copy -verbose '{source-server/user=kowalski}toto' \
 		       '{dovecot-server/user=kowalski}toto'

When the destination storage format is maildir, the mailboxes are not 
the same. I checked the contents of the maildir, in the .toto/cur/ 
directory. What I see is the files having correct mtime (I also checked 
their contents). But when I use pine, and its arrival sort, to look into 
this 'toto' folder, the last message received is as the top.

When the destination storage format is mbox, there is no problem, the 
mailboxes are the same.

-- 
Nicolas