[Dovecot] why is there email in my mbox file?

[Kendall Shaw]

Jochen Schulz <ml at well-adjusted.de> writes:

> Kendall Shaw:
>> 
>> I expected dovecot to take the mail out of the mbox file and put it
>> somewhere.
>
> Why should it do this? Dovecot normally tries to automatically detect
> where your mailboxes are and if it finds them in one of the usual places
> (for example your /var/mail/user) it uses this location.

To be able to create folders and such that mbox doesn't describe and
IMAP does maybe. In anycase, I wonder if you have more advice for me
about converting to maildir.

>> But, I see there's a big mbox file (/var/mail/me) that
>> keeps growing. Is dovecot using that as the store of messages?
>
> Probably. Why don't you take a look?

I've taken a look at the file and no thoughts appeared while I was doing that.

I see there is both the file in /var/mail/me and in /home/me/.dovecot
there are a number of files that seem to correspond to the IMAP
folders.

In dovecot.conf I have:

default_mail_env = mbox:~/.dovecot/:INBOX=/var/mail/me

It was unclear to me if the directory other than the one labeled INBOX
was required. I was guessing that dovecot might take the messages out
of the inbox and put them into the other path.

>> If I were to move to using maildir instead of mbox, what is
>> going to happen to my existing mail?
>
> Nothing. You would have to move your mboxes to maildir yourself.  You
> can use programs like mb2md to do that.

Thanks for this advice. I used mb2md to create a Maildir directory using:

mb2md -m
mb2md -s /var/mail/me -R

I also changed dovecot.conf to use:

default_mail_env = maildir:~/Maildir

And changed exim to use Maildir instead of my mbox file, using the
lines in the example for debian on the dovecot main page.

The result is that I get no mail. The log file looks essentially the same with some variations.

Using mbox, logging in looks like:

Feb  8 14:42:52 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): Effective uid=1000, gid=1000
Feb  8 14:42:52 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): mbox: data=/home/me/.dovecot/:INBOX=/var/mail/me
Feb  8 14:42:52 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): mbox: root=/home/me/.dovecot, index=/home/me/.dovecot, inbox=/var/mail/me

Using maildir, logging in looks like:

Feb  8 14:34:11 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): Effective uid=1000, gid=1000
Feb  8 14:34:11 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): maildir: data=/home/me/Maildir
Feb  8 14:34:11 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): maildir: root=/home/me/Maildir, index=/home/me/Maildir, control=, inbox=

Do I need to indicate where the inbox is somehow in default_mail_env?

Kendall