This is a 'has anyone run into this and solved it' post. And yes, I've been reading and re-reading TFM but without luck. The background is that I'm working on tooling before we start a mass maildir->mdbox conversion. One of those tools is recovering mail from backups (easy as pie with maildir).
We've got all of our email on Netapp file servers. They have nice snapshotting but the snapshots are, of course, readonly.
My question: is there a doveadm command that will allow for email to be retrieved from a readonly mdbox, either directly (like manipulating the mdbox files directly) or by doveadm talking to the dovecot processes?
Ideally, there'd be something like doveadm dump, but that could dump selected message contents.
I've tried using IMAP with mail_location pointed at the snapshot, but, though I can get a listing of emails in the mailbox, the fetch fails when dovecot can't write-lock dovecot.index.log.
If anyone has gotten something similar to work, I'd love to hear about it. A working IMAP setup would be the ideal, since it's more easily automatible (but I'll take whatever I can get).
Any and all hints are most welcome!
Hi Mark,
I had exactly the same problem as you. I also tried to put the INDEX to a writeable fs (also to MEMORY) but it did not work. What I did in the end is that I created a writeable version of my read-only snapshot using AuFS. This way I was able to access the snapshot over IMAP and destroy the AuFS mount when finished.
It's not a perfect solution, but it works :)
Regards,
Peter