[Dovecot] Migrating mail from mbox to maildir using dovecot

[William Blunn]

On 11/09/2010 20:17, Donny Brooks wrote:
> On the old mail server it is: dovecot-1.2.11-3.fc11.x86_64
> On the new mail server we are migrating to it is: dovecot-1.2.14-1.fc13.x86_64 currently
>
> Is there a repo out there that I can install 2.0 from? The only one I have found is atrpms and it is a pain to get conflict worked out with other packages.
>    

If you use Dovecot 2.0 you also get the choice of multi-dbox.

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/dbox

This would give you some advantages:

* With multi-dbox, multiple messages are stored in the same file. But 
once a mail file contains 2 megabytes (configurable), Dovecot moves on 
to a new file and leaves the old files unchanging. This should be quite 
nice for your backup strategy because you would only backup the 
"current" file for each user, limited to 2 megabytes per user (or 
whatever amount you think appropriate).

* With multi-dbox, if you have many small messages, these are all stored 
in the same file. This vastly reduces the number of files required to 
store mail, which means fewer inodes consumed, and I think backup 
systems often work better with a smaller number of larger files than a 
larger number of smaller files.

If you use multi-dbox, you will need to use a Dovecot delivery software 
(e.g. dovecot-lda).

Bill