[Dovecot] dovecot rpms, .subscriptions file, mbox to maildir

[Saurabh Barve]

Hi,

I am running dovecot 0.99-14 on a Fedora Core 2 machine. I had a few 
questions:

1) I wanted to upgrade to the dovecot-1.0 release. However, I am not 
sure if that's really required. dovecot-0.99-14 has been running very 
well for me for quite some time. Is there a real advantage to switching 
to the latest release. The reason I'm asking this is because:
    i)  I don't have too many users to server - around 15 only.
    ii) My mail server is a pretty fast machine (~1 GHz, 1 GB RAM)
        machine, so hardware isn't too much of an issue.
    iii) I like to install software from rpm's. It's not that I can't
         install from source, but installing from rpm's makes it much
         easier for me. Just a personal preference. The version of
         dovecot that I am running was obtained from Dag Wieers web site.
         I haven't seen a newer version there. I've googled for rpm's for
         newer versions, and they are available, but I don't want to
         install it from some third party source that I don't know/trust.
    iv) I am also planning to support web mail for my users (probably
        through Squirrelmail). Are there any advantages/disadvantages to
        upgrading dovecot for that?
    v) People use Mozilla Mail, Mail.app, Thunderbird, Outlook, and
       Opera. Does the 1.0 version provide better integration with
       different mail clients (even though I understand that sometimes 		
       it's a problem with the client implementation).

So, are there newer version of dovecot (1.0-stable) available in rpm 
formats which are guaranteed to be safe and un-trojaned? And is there 
any really good reason why I should upgrade to 1.0-stable?

2) My second question is about creating the .subscriptions (or 
subscriptions in 1.0) file. When I moved people over from using pine to 
using a mail client like Evolution/Thunderbird, I had to create 
.subscriptions/.mailboxlist file for them so that they could see the 
folders that they had created in pine. However, people still sometimes 
access e-mail using pine. They then create new folders in pine, which 
they are unable to see in their mail client. Is there a way around it? 
This occurs especially when people check their mail at the start of the 
month, and pine asks about saving/deleting old sent-mail folders, Trash 
folders. Is there a way to add these folders automagically to the 
.subscriptions file?

3) Would I be able to support web mail using mailboxes in mbox format, 
as I have them now? Or do I have to go for Maildir format? Since our 
university introduced web mail, they have had two sets of folders - one 
with capitalization (Sent, Deleted Messages, etc.) and one without 
(sent-mail, etc. - these were from our pine days). Is this due to web mail?

Also, if I do need to convert from mbox to Maildir, what is the standard 
tool for doing that? I saw at least three different tools/scripts for 
doing that (mbox2maildir,mb2d,mb2md-2,mb2md.pl, .. ). Which tool (and 
from where) should I use to convert mailboxes without problems?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Saurabh.
-----
sa at atmos.colostate.edu