[Dovecot] More detail re dovecot-uidlist and -uidvalidity files

[Ben Morrow]

At 10AM +0200 on 13/12/12 you (Dale Gallagher) wrote:
> Regarding the dovecot-uidlist header (first line) - I've tried to search
> for and figure out what exactly is meant by the "mailbox global uid" and
> once I do, how to manually generate the 128 bit hex variation of it? Could
> someone elaborate on this, please.
> 
> How would omitting the global uid field, beginning with G, affect remote
> clients' syncing of mail? Is this field mandatory? Would "3 V$uid_validity
> N$next_uid" be sufficient to ensure that clients don't re-download
> everything?
> 
> I also see that Dovecot's dovecot-uidvalidity is of the form 4df8a4e2,
> whereas the IMAP syncing utility which I'm using (isync) uses an integer.
> I'd appreciate it if someone could elaborate on what Dovecot uses and
> whether I need to convert one to the other (ie. after syncing with isync,
> do I need to convert it to work with Dovecot?

Have you tried using dsync instead of isync to copy the mailboxes
across?

    dsync -o mail_location=imapc: -o imapc_host=old.imap.server \
        -o imapc_user=USER -o imapc_password=PASSWORD \
        backup maildir:/home/user/Maildir

The last parameter is the destination for the copy, in mail_location
format. This will (should) preserve all IMAP-visible information in the
Dovecot index files. See also http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Migration/Dsync .

Ben