[Dovecot] converting from courier questions

[Aaron P. Martinez]

I currently run postfix and courier on my mail servers with squirrelmail. 
The problem with courier is it seems to run so slow.  The webmail takes
forever to load if you have many mails.  I have this set up in virtual
domains with all longin and path info in an mysql database. I just joined
the list and DID google before asking, hope this isn't a common question.

With courier it looks for a "homedir" and then a "maildir"..

I tried doing a query as such:

user_query = SELECT Homedir and Maildir AS home, VUID AS uid , VGID AS gid
 FROM users WHERE Email_address = '%u'

to no avail, is my sql wrong or can you not cat the homedir and maildir
fields together to create the complete path to home?

. i got around the homedir problem by setting
mail_chroot = /var/spool/postfix/virtuals  (is this the general way, only
way?)

and then in my dovecot-mysql.conf i have user_query = SELECT Maildir AS
home, VUID AS uid , VGID AS gid  FROM users WHERE Email_address = '%u'

This almost worked but as i was watching the logs it was looking for
/var/spool/postfix/virtuals/<somedomainname>/Maildir//Maildir

In courier the "Maildir" is not implied, it has to be spicified in the
database.  I have a LOT of users and would love to avoid chaning every
line in my database. or add another filed just for dovecot.  I would also
like the ability to switch back and forth for testing with courier..

Is there anyway that this can be done?

Thanks in advance,

Aaron