Dovecot Replica one user at a time

Hi all,

I have two IMAP/LMTP Dovecot server in replica (version 2.3.4.1) for testing purposes, both connected through an IPsec tunnel, I use LDAP/AD for /userdb, /all seems to work fine.

Now I would like to go in production where at the moment I have only one server active and setup the replica too ... but! I need to know how I can exclude all the users from replication (help/examples appreciated!) and doing replication one user at a time, in order to not saturate bandwidth on the IPsec tunnel.

I read https://wiki.dovecot.org/Replication:

"Since v2.3.1 you can disable replication for a user by providing 'noreplicate' user database field https://wiki.dovecot.org/UserDatabase/ExtraFields. Another way to disable replication for some users is to return mail_replica field from userdb for users you want to replicate."

but I can't figure out how to do it.

One last question: since I have to deal with huge mailboxes, if prior to activate replication I do an rsync between the two Dovecot filesystems, does the replication will work?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers

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*Claudio Corvino IT Systems Administrator*