[Dovecot] dsync: convert only mbox in /var/mail to maildir?

[Timo Sirainen]

On 20.4.2012, at 22.26, Jeff Simmons wrote:

> I'm migrating an old UW pop server to a new Dovecot server. The old server did 
> not allow mail to be stored on the server, so only mbox files exist in 
> /var/mail, with nothing in /home/$user. I'd like to copy the /var/mail 
> directory over to the new server and then use dsync to convert the mbox files 
> and put them in /home/$user/Maildir, but every permutation of the command line 
> I've tried dies with a variation on can't find/write either /var/mail/mail or 
> /home/$user/mail, seems it won't deal with mbox files without an associated 
> mail directory. Can dsync be used for this kind of conversion, or should I 
> look elsewhere for conversion utilities?

Assuming in destination server the mbox is in /var/mail/$user and you want the destination to ~/Maildir:

in dovecot.conf set:
mail_location = maildir.~/Maildir

rm -rf /tmp/emptydir
dsync mirror mbox:/tmp/emptydir:/var/mail/$user

be sure to delete the emptydir between users.