[Dovecot] Maildir, INDEX, and folders

[Justin McAleer]

Troy Engel wrote:
> I'm reading the wiki et el. regarding indexes, but can't come up with 
> a coherent answer to the setup and what will happen. I want to take 
> the indexes and move them off of NFS (~/Maildir) and place in 
> /var/spool/dovecot/indexes, but not have to hand create everything 
> (user homes, mail folders)
>
> So, I create a parent folder /var/spool/dovecot/indexes that has the 
> appropriate permissions for writing by all users/dovecot. If I then set:
>
>  mail_location = 
> maildir:~/Maildir:INDEX=/ovar/spol/dovecot/indexes/%1u/%u
>
> ...will the dovecot daemon(s) automagically create (A) the parent user 
> folders (i.e. .../indexes/t/tengel/)(1), and (B) the necessary 
> subfolders for all the child folder indexes? (i.e. 
> .../tengel/.Lists.Dovecot/)
>

It will, but beware... all directories will be created as the user's uid 
and gid. So, if you use a different uid for each user, you should 
manually create the /var/spool/dovecot/indexes/%1u directories first 
with the proper ownership and permissions. Otherwise, when 
/var/spool/dovecot/indexes/a gets created for user abc, it will be owned 
by abc and creation of /var/spool/dovecot/indexes/a/asmith by user 
asmith will fail.

If you're using the same uid for everyone, you don't need to worry about 
it. On the other hand, if you're really doing just a one character hash, 
is there a good reason not to just create the dirs ahead of time? :) I'm 
doing a more complex hash, and have different uids, so I had to write a 
script to make the directory structure. Just wanted to save you a little 
possible time.

> Most of the doc info seems to revolve around moving your indexes if 
> you use mbox, I'm a little fuzzy on what happens with Maildir when you 
> attempt this.
>
> thanks!
> -te
>
> (1) in our setup, initially user's home folders are created on an 
> admin server -> NFS that is not the mail server, so Dovecot needs to 
> create the home & index folders on it's own at runtime.
>