My sub-folder with Outlook work-around to date

Sun Oct 8 17:12:42 EEST 2017

Wow excellent feedback Joseph, Philon and Aki,

You have all pointed me in the right direction. Tonight I have tested 
Dovecot with just the minor configs I do for Dovecot setup and I have 
commented out the mbox/Maildir lines in 10-mail.conf from my testing:

#mail_location =
#mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
#mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

I had run up some test files (folders) under mbox using 
"/u/home/user/mail_test" and then renamed this to 'mail' (so 
/u/home/user/mail).
Ran some tests with sends/receives, created folders - all good. Created 
mbox text folders.

Then had my initial test 'Maildir_test' populated with test folders 
which I renamed to /u/home/user/Maildir - and each time I restarted 
Outlook it was obeying the folder 'format' based on whether I had 'mail' 
or 'Maildir' in place.

I did see in the posts and docs on-line somewhere that someone mentioned 
the later implementations of Dovecot, without hard-setting either mbox 
or Maildir in the 10-mail.conf file, Dovecot, based on the presence of 
the particular directory in the user's $HOME directory obeys the rules 
based on mbox/Maildir respectively.

I haven't needed to touch the namespace rules as per:

https://wiki2.dovecot.org/Namespaces

so the only files that bear any changes from the installed config in 
conf.d are:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14531 Oct  8 23:28 10-mail.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  2965 Oct  7 08:49 10-master.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1728 Oct  7 08:52 10-ssl.conf

This will make migration so much easier with converting one user at a 
time and then getting them to start Outlook and re-sync things again.

This will save a massive job from being just that and can be done in 
batches of users to suit time constraints.

I will post here once again to let you all know how I fare but just 
proves to me over and over again the power of the Linux e-mail server 
with Dovecot for IMAP and being able to keep with the older SendMail MTA 
(been working with Sendmail since 1996 so....).

Thank you all so much for taking time to respond.

On 08/10/17 20:32, Aki Tuomi wrote:
> You can give mail location and home directory from userdb or passdb.
> 
> For userdb, return mail=something:~/something and for home use home=/path/to/home
> 
> For passdb, you can return userdb_mail and userdb_home
> 
> Aki
> 
>> On October 8, 2017 at 1:14 PM Philon <bytesplit at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Hi David,
>>
>> I somehow remember that there is a way to get the mail_location from per-user-settings. I had this once when migrating from maildir to mdbox.
>>
>> You might want to use Google and the mailing list archives for the details but in summary it went like this:
>>
>> - set Dovecot to grab the mail_location from user-settings (I think we used MySQL db field - or check docs for auto:)
>> - have login script which converts maildir from setup A to B and update the user setting
>> - kick the user once again to apply the setting (I’m not sure about this)
>>
>> This then automates the conversion process to happen on next user login.
>>
>> Be warned though that today with all the idle phones, probably many users will re-login after you restart the server. Perhaps the scripting could handle a timer which randomizes this a little.
>>
>>
>> Philon
>>
>>
>>> Am 07.10.2017 um 02:22 schrieb David.M.Clark <david at davrom.com>:
>>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> Thanks to MJ for the suggestion as my only hope, and I have tested this with Outlook 2016 and Thunderbird today - seamless creation of folders.
>>>
>>> Now the mammoth task of converting customers with masses of mbox folders to MailDir format using the on-line perl script: mb2md-3.20.pl
>>>
>>> Works nicely and will be what gets us out of trouble. My only sadness is that Outlook then has to be 're-subscribed' to the folders again.... which makes sense or maybe I didn't give it long enough - its IMAP folder syncs are extremely slow compared to Thunderbird which I also tested in parallel. Thunderbird didn't need any re-sync, it just found the new subscription setup and was ready to go. But in all fairness, Outlook is still really only an Exchange compatible product for the most part.
>>>
>>> Would be great to run both mbox and MailDir at the same time so we can do the slow user-by-user process rather than having them all down at some point completely - might look at running Dovecot on a different port maybe with a different ".conf" but thinking this may not work anyway or cause issues.... back to my server tests to see :-)
>>>
>>> I use additional ports to 143 for external IMAP restrictions anyway so might be able to do this method somehow.
>>>
>>> Anyway, for those interested in where I got to in my testing so far...
>>>
>>> 1. Download perl script "mb2md-3.20.pl" from:
>>>
>>> http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md
>>>
>>> 2. Changed Dovecot /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf mbox entry to MailDir:
>>>
>>> #mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
>>> mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir
>>>
>>> 3. Restarted Dovecot
>>>
>>> 4. su as user and in their home (/u/home/user on my setup):
>>>
>>> /u/packages/mb2md-3.20.pl -m
>>>
>>> then:
>>>
>>> mv mail mail_old
>>>
>>> then:
>>>
>>> /u/packages/mb2md-3.20.pl -s mail_old -R
>>>
>>> then:
>>>
>>> Login with Outlook and subscribe to IMAP folders again.
>>>
>>> Not a big fan of gazillions of little eml based text mail files in directories but hey, if it fixes our issues, maybe I need to stop wambulancing about it all and do as I am told :-)
>>>
>>> Hope this helps - will keep this e-mail updated on findings if anything else comes to light.

-- 

As always, I remain at your service.

Kindest Regards,
David.M.Clark (Director - Senior Linux/UNIX Consultant)
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