[Dovecot] Subscription file

[Rich West]

We performed, at a couple of different sites, a migration from UW-IMAP
(slow) to dovecot 1.0rcX (blazingly fast) and did a similar step.  What
we did was audit the main mail server system to determine where all of
the .mailboxlist files were, and we created a copy of each of those
.mailboxlist files as .subscriptions.  In other words, in a given user's
home directory, they had a .mailboxlist file and a .subscriptions file
just prior to the migration.  Immediately after the migration was
complete, we removed all of the .mailbox list files from the system
(actually, we backed them up first, then removed them).

The migration was seamless to the end user community.

The key element here, though, is that the .mailboxlist and
.subscriptions files reside at the top level of the user's home
directory ($HOME) regardless of how they have their IMAP root directory
configured.  The format we've seen of the .subscriptions and
.mailboxlist files is:
mail/Sent
mail/Marketing/Bill
...

The .subscriptions contents are relative to the user's home directory,
and the IMAP root directory configured on the client defines the
'filter', so to speak.  You may want to take a good look at the contents
of your .mailboxlist files to make sure everything will go as planned. 
If necessary, you can always run them through a perl script to massage
them just the right way, but I doubt you would need to.  The migration
is, after all is said and done, somewhat painless.

-Rich


Steven F Siirila wrote:
> Background:
>
> We are a UW-IMAP shop, using mbox format.  (!)
> We are in the process of upgrading to Dovecot, hopefully to 1.0 proper. :)
> One of the modifications we have been using in test versions of Dovecot
> involve the move of the user subscription file from:
>
> 	IMAP-root/.subscriptions
>
> to:
>
> 	$HOME/.mailboxlist
>
> Rather than having to make changes to Dovecot source code each time a new
> release comes out, it would seem to make sense to have a way to configure
> this from dovecot.conf.  Something like:
>
> 	# Default (%i denotes IMAP root):
> 	#imap_subscription_file = %i/.subscriptions
>
> 	# UW-imap-style (%h denotes home directory):
> 	#imap_subscription_file = %h/.mailboxlist
>
> While it makes sense to me to have the subscription file where it is in
> Dovecot by default, it would be a substantial undertaking to determine
> where to move the .mailboxlist to in our environment for each user, since
> there is no easy way to determine what a user's IMAP root directory is set 
> to in their client.
>
> Thoughts?