[Dovecot] Moving new email from the mail spool to the inbox

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Chris Wakelin <c.d.wakelin at reading.ac.uk>:

> I guess you're delivering mail to /var/mail/username, and UW-IMAP
> "snarfs" (to use the UW term :))  the messages to ~/mbox (if it exists)
> whenever the user opens INBOX in IMAP.

Yes, we used to do this also, but we stopped when we went to dovecot.

Since we're a small installation, we just merged the ~mbox files back
into the /var/spool/mail/username files...

Since the person posting the question has 30K users, this may not be
feasible.  Depends on what percentage of them use the ~mbox feature.

> It might also be possible to write a Dovecot plugin to emulate the
> UW-IMAP "snarf" behaviour, but as far as I know, nobody has.

AFAIK there is none also, but one would be "way cool" to have...

> I have to say that our UW-IMAP -> Dovecot transition was painless
> (transparent!) and that the performance gains were huge (otherwise we'd
> still be "pruning" user's INBOXes into folders for them every few months).

I agree completely.  No one noticed anything except for the blazing
performance change, and I also was able to stop "pruning" user's inboxes.
Was not only painless, but removed a lot of existing pain!

> Best Wishes,
> Chris

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Go Longhorns!