[Dovecot] IMAP subfolders and MDBOX

Ed W lists at wildgooses.com
Thu Feb 10 12:13:32 EET 2011


On 09/02/2011 23:04, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> It is possible to convert from MBOX to MDBOX in one shot ?
> You can run dsync one user at a time, and of course you can run it for
> as many users as you want. I'd suggest switching a few users first to
> make sure everything will work nicely.

Just to highlight the marvellous "Proxy" feature in Dovecot...

If you are migrating users then you can set your main dovecot instance 
to proxy to a test instance based on various criteria.  In this way it's 
possible to do a near live migration one user at a time without changing 
any user visible server options.  This feature is also great for moving 
machines between IPs or other similar changes

I'm sure all the big installations already thought about this, but it's 
just something that the "smaller" installations might not have given 
some thought to.  I fall into the "smaller" category, but very early on 
I put a field in our user db showing which server the user lives on.  
Now with a small extra addition to the transport routing, postfix 
automatically delivers to the correct final server (no matter which 
server mail is injected into) and dovecot also proxies to the correct 
destination server (again no matter which you initially connect to).  
This is extremely helpful when you move stuff around!!

Good luck - very interested to hear how performance of mdbox works out?

Ed W


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