[Dovecot] UID order vs date order

[Robert Schetterer]

Am 20.11.2013 07:56, schrieb Torbjorn Jansson:
> On 2013-11-17 19:27, LuKreme wrote:
>>
>> On 17 Nov 2013, at 03:20 , Torbjorn Jansson
>> <torbjorn.jansson at mbox200.swipnet.se> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> i have recently moved a mailbox to dovecot and intend to use it via
>>> imap and i have run into a problem.
>>>
>>> when i imported the mails apparently the UID order got reversed
>>> compared to the date order, result is that some clients like on
>>> android devices download the oldest mails instead of newest.
>>> it is not so interesting to have several years old mail show up at
>>> the top of the mailbox.
>>>
>>> is there any way of convincing dovecot to renumber the mails by date
>>> order instead?
>>
>> Probably the easiest solution is to figure out what you did in the
>> import to cause this and reimport the mails. Short of that, the only
>> thing you can do (assuming you are using Maildir, right?) is to get
>> the date out of the mail and rewrite the filename with the correct
>> epoch timestamp.
>>
>> It would be great if there was a way to use doveadm to do this, but
>> short of that you just have to fix it yourself. The good news is, with
>> gnu date it’s pretty simple.
>>
>>   $ date --date='2013-11-17 01:23:45 +0700' +%s
>> 1384626225
>>   $ gdate --date='November 17, 2013 01:23:45 +0700' +%s
>> 1384626225
>>   $ gdate --date='17 Nov 2013 01:23:45 +0700' +%s
>> 1384626225
>>
>>> i cant be the only one that have run into this.
>>
>> I had a similar problem, but I ignored it and as new mail came in, the
>> problem went away (mostly) on its own. :/
>>
> 
> i have fixed the problem.
> initially during my testing i did try the outlook import to imap folder
> and it worked but for some reason it aborted half way thru, probably due
> to some badly formed mail from many years ago so i chose not to use
> outlook for the conversion.
> 
> but i had to use outlook anyway and what i did was to copy one folder at
> a time via outlook from the local pst to imap folder, some folders i
> lost a few mails but not many.
> end result is that i have a good mailbox now.
> 
> to sum it up:
> 
> Tbird import
> works, no problem with character sets but screws up the order of the mails.
> 
> Outlook import
> works but more likely to stop on bad mails, some character set issues (a
> few mails ended up with ??? in the sender instead of the right name) and
> sort order is correct.
> 
> 
> 
> i did run into another issue and that was with android email client, it
> decided to use up all 10 simultaneous connections and then displayed an
> error.
> had to increase the connection limit several times and at one point the
> client used 65 connections at the same time.
> compare this with tbird that uses only 5.
> but i believe this is a known issue.
> 

thx for info, so it looks like many client problems here , but none by
dovecot, anyway good to know about cause migration/restore from pst file
might happen in many places

Best Regards
MfG Robert Schetterer

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