[Dovecot] Best way to move mail to an archive

[Richard C. Cox]

Hello all...new to dovecot and this list.

I have a question that may have been answered before, but I can't find anything 
yet that addresses it directly.  I installed dovecot 2.0.8 (+postfix, 
fetchmail) on a small server to manage several e-mail accounts.  I love this 
software!

So, to back to the question:  I'd like to archive e-mail as it ages into a 
single IMAP archive directory.  Ideally, I would like to set up a cron job to 
search for e-mail in all of my imap directories that older that 'X' days and 
move it to the archive directory.  I know that dovecot wants to manage e-mail 
movement thru the IMAP interface, so I'm leery of just using ordinary Linux 
commands to move mail around and bypass the IMAP protocol.  Does anybody have 
any recommendations about dovecot/IMAP safe commands I could use to accomplish 
this task?

Thanks in advance and I apologize for not being more knowledgeable about this 
subject.

Regards,

Richard