[Dovecot] Moving Maildir email messages and backing things up.

[mouss]

Karl Schmidt wrote:
> I just moved to dovecot with Maildir. I think this is probably a 
> stupid question, but I couldn't find an answer after an hour of 
> googling and searching the wiki.
>
> What would happen if I ran a script that did this:
>
> mv ~/Maildir/.folder_one/cur/* ~/Maildir/.folder_two/cur/
>
> My hunch is it might break things.

shouldn't break anything. if the MUA is caching "actions" (happens with 
thunderbird at least), then the view in the client will be different but 
this is not a big problem (at least for me).

but if it's for backup, why are you moving files?
>
> What if dovecot was stopped?
>
>
> ,.,.,.
>
>
> Where can I find a list of files in ~/Maildir/ and a note on what they 
> are? (And similarly for a ~/Maildir/.folder)
>
> I'm wondering if everything needs to be backed up, or if I can/should 
> skip the indexes. What happens if any of these files changes during 
> the backup? (I'm thinking I shouldn't have to stop dovecot for a backup).