migrate Maildir to mdbox

[Joseph Tam]

Michael Segel <dovecot_mjs at hotmail.com> writes:

> Which is preferred? MailDir or Mbox?  (directory vs flat file)

Mailbox; I wish I converted when I had the chance.  The only benefits
I can see with mbox is that it's slightly less complicated, and if
you're doing pattern searching or some global mailbox operation, less
I/O intensive, but that's a niche case and usually ameliorated by indices.

However, backing up mbox is a pain since changes results in the entire
file being backed up for snapshotting filesystems, and atomicity of
I/O operations is much harder.  It just doesn't scale well for large
mailboxes.

As Aki recommends, use something other than mbox unless you got some
legacy issue.

> How would you do this when migrating from an old server to a new one?

Lots of third party scripts out there that will convert for you.  I think
you can do dovecot->dovecot dsync to convert.

Joseph Tam <jtam.home at gmail.com>