On Sat, 22 Oct 2011, Hadmut Danisch wrote:
Again, this discussion is nuts. If this is supposed to be some support mailing list (as the dovecot web page suggests) people should take care to focus on the question rather than taking a question as an opportunity for telling their individual opinion.
The main question is whether I can draw a precise copy of a mailfolder through IMAP without any loss of data.
My last reply to this thread, then.
The answer to your main question would be 'yes', since Dovecot's IMAP interface supports retrieving the entire email message including all its meta-data (aka headers or envelope).
The mbox from-line, not to be confused with the From: header, is simply not part of the email message but used only as a separator. Heck, it need not even contain valid information, but only proper formatting to satisfy picky/"smart" MUA's. Usually, it conveniently does carry some useful information, but e.g. when the SMTP envelope-from is '<>' then the mbox from-line usually contains something like MAILER-DAEMON to stay within the formatting specification.
So, instead of blaming others of derailing a discussion and/or not simply answering a question, it might be an equally good idea to think twice about how you asked the question.
I'm actually happy that 'simple' questions are handled the way they are. Most people do not want an answer to the question they asked, but want a solution to their problem. Which they may have described in the question but often is left as an exercise for the reader. ;-)
But then again, I'm a technician, not a shrink, so my apologies for being so unfriendly...
-- Maarten