[Dovecot] Migrating mail from mbox to maildir using dovecot

[Donny Brooks]

 I think I will have to stay with the 1.x branch since we have to stick to using approved rpm's (internal policy) and fedora 13 does not have a 2.x branch that I see yet. So maildir it is for now. 

I see my error on the inbox not getting the new mail. That was one of those "all nighter" errors that I just plain missed due to lack of sleep. I forgot to point postfix to the proper place to deliver the mail. 

So once I setup postfix to deliver the mail properly and the dovecot convert plugin is setup, is there a way to gradually migrate the users so I don't kill the server? We have about 220GB or so of mail between about 160+/- users. What would be the best way to migrate it all to maildir?
 
 
-- 
 
Donny B. 
 
On Sunday, September 12, 2010 02:56 AM CDT, William Blunn <bill at blunn.org> wrote: 
 
> 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