[Dovecot] .mailboxlist -> .subscriptions

[Steve Campbell]

I've mostly finished a conversion from an old Centos 3 UW-Imap server to 
a new Centos 6 dovecot server. I did not copy the old ~/.mailboxlist 
file to ~/mail/.subscriptions file, but notice some users have the 
latter file now. These are all mbox folders on the old and new server.

I'm getting ready to do the same to another old/new pair of servers and 
I'm wondering if there is an advantage of doing the copy. I'm assuming 
the .subscription files are created when they access  their account 
through our webmail application, but I'm not sure if it was automatic or 
due to a "subscribe" action done manually. There are 49 accounts with a 
.mailboxlist file and only 4 with the new .subscriptions file. So either 
our webmail application isn't being used a lot or there's a problem with 
it due to the missing .subscriptions file, but the phone usually rings 
pretty quickly when problems arise.

One last question, please.

Over the years, some imap accounts had their folders directly in their 
home directory and the contents of the .mailboxlist file would have an 
entry with just the name of the folder in it (Trash, eg), and most had 
the folders in their ~/mail folder with an entry like "mail/Trash". Our 
webmail app, Horde/Imp, always seemed to take care of this. If I create 
the .subscription file for the users during the move to the new server, 
should I move the folders to the mail directory and amend their 
.subscriptions file to reflect that change on these odd ball accounts, 
and will that affect how their client is seeing these?

The first server conversion was a bear due to my lack of dovecot 
knowledge. I've since learned a little more, and mostly found out that 
dovecot is a more complex application than the old imap application. 
There's so much more that can be done with dovecot, whereas the old imap 
server was mostly just load-and-go. Seems like no matter how much I 
read, the more I discovered I didn't know.

Anyway, thanks for all the past help and any opinions anyone might 
decide to offer on this post.

steve campbell