[Dovecot] .mailboxlist -> .subscriptions

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2012-03-14 at 10:46 -0400, Steve Campbell wrote:
> I've mostly finished a conversion from an old Centos 3 UW-Imap server to 
> a new Centos 6 dovecot server. 

This is messy stuff to do. There are ways you could make Dovecot behave
identically to UW-IMAP (mail_full_filesystem_access=yes), but for future
and for security it's better if you don't do that.

> 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.

Copying it for users who haven't already readded their subscriptions
would be a good idea.

> 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?

Yes, move all of the mboxes to mail/ directory. With the compatibility
namespaces it should work so that clients don't notice changes:

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Namespaces -> Backwards Compatibility

There are also a few old mailing list threads detailing all kinds of
issues and solutions related to UW-IMAP -> Dovecot migration..