[Dovecot] Best way from Mbox to Maildir using 2.17?

[Mark Moore]

On 11/04/2013 02:29 AM, Noel Butler wrote:
> On 04/11/2013 14:33, Regan Yelcich wrote:
>> On 2/11/2013, at 11:40 pm, Noel Butler <noel.butler at ausics.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On 02/11/2013 20:25, Regan Yelcich wrote:
>>>> Can someone advise the best way to convert mailboxes from Mbox to
>>>> Maildir for Dovecot 2.17 on Ubuntu? Thanks.
>>>
>>>
>>> mb2md.pl
>>>
>>> http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/


The program has at least 2 bugs in it:

. If the body has paragraph break (i.e., '\n') followed by the RFC822
   keyword 'From', the original message will loose the last half of
   the message and a phantom message will be created.

   Change from my notes:

	#           if ( /^From /
	#     -to-
	#           if ( /^From .*? \d\d:\d\d:\d\d \d\d\d\d/

. I never could figure out where the second bug was. This one created
   some messages with blank subject lines.

Another annoyance was prefixing the newly created mail folders with a '.'

Our site is small (300 users) with 15-20 years of e-mail history.
A conservative estimate of the conversion was something like 30 million
messages.

Did it work? Yes. I wish I had more time for testing, though. In the end,
we fixed the problems on the back side.

>>
>>
>> I don't need to do anything specific for Dovecot? It'll see the new
>> Maildir account and automatically create the indexes etc?
>
> IIRC it shows you how to use it, you need to indicate where the new maildir is, if you have only a few, do them all manually, if you
> have many, write a quick bash or perl script to do them, and dovecot will create the indexes when they login.
>
> You will need to tell dovecot to look for the new location though, if your using system users as I suspect you are, then
> maildir:~/Maildir should do it *but* dont forget to make sure your MTA knows to use maildir as well, I've not worked with system
> users for a decade, but I think in postfix   home_mailbox = Maildir/ will do it, with sendmail its much more tricky and your best
> sticking with mbox, if exim, NFI - dont use it :)
>


-- 

	Mark
	--0-
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Mark Moore
UCAR/NCAR/CGD					mmoore at ucar.edu
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