[Dovecot] Converting mbox to Maildir, all prior read messages are downloaded as new

[Timo Sirainen]

On Fri, 2007-05-25 at 14:36 -0400, FiL wrote:
> > I guess you're talking about POP3. You'd need to be able to preserve 
> > the POP3 UIDLs (see http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration), which would 
> > require that you also preserve the IMAP UIDs in the mbox -> Maildir 
> > switch. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any scripts that preserves the 
> > UIDs, although it wouldn't be difficult to write support for that.
> >
> This is not only about POP3, as far as I can tell. If you converting
> mbox to Maildir (dovecot to dovecot) - UIDs change. And if you have your
> client set to cache all the messages and
> you have over 1Gb in your mail... well, it will be transferring all your
> mail again. Deleting the old one (as it is not on the server anymore)
> and re-downloading new ones.

Right. But it's not as bad as with POP3 where the messages are
downloaded as duplicates.

> It would be nice to have Convert plugin, that preserves UIDs and
> UIDVALIDITY values.

It would require changing Dovecot internals to support that. Not a
simple thing to do.

> I have all my mbox-es in /raid/mbox/%u
> I have set convert_mail = mbox:/raid/mbox/%u:INBOX=/var/mail/%u in the
> dovecot.conf.
> But for some reason the folder with mail doesn't get renamed after
> conversion. Is that the way it should be?

And the destination isn't /raid/mbox/%u? It should have renamed the %u
to %u-converted.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20070526/9ab14217/attachment.bin