Hi Patrick,
On 20 Aug 2007, at 23:21, Patrick - South Valley Internet wrote:
I've read so much information on this that I'm a little confused as
to what to follow. Here's what's going on:We just migrated away from our AIX machines which were running
Postfix and UW-IMAP. We're now running Postfix with Dovecot. I
already converted everyone's mbox file to maildir, but now I'm
having a little troubles with how to exactly populate their IMAP
folders. People are saying they cannot see their folders. These
'folders' they are talking about can be found in their /home
directory.
I'm not sure this is relevant but...
Here we found that the standard installation of Outlook will by
default only show folders that you have subscribed to. This means if
you simply convert the folders from Mbox to Maildir and put them into
place Outlook users won't be shown them unless either:
a) You also carefully convert the subscriptions data too (which
the UW
server keeps in a file called .mailboxlist), or
b) You have everyone change their Outlook setting to show ALL
folders instead
only the subscribed ones.
Aside: the latter may be problematic in the longer run: I encountered
Windows Mail (the Outlook Express replacement under Vista) for the
first time yesterday, and this doesn't seem to have a "Show all
folders" setting ... at least not one that I could find. :-(
We decided it was too risky to convert people's mailboxes and
subscriptions files: we were using UW's MBX format, which meant the
conversion process would have been MBX --> Mbox --> Maildir :-(
Instead we're using the very-wonderful "imapsync" utility. This is a
Perl script that does everything using IMAP. In particular it
obtains the folder listing over IMAP, reads the messages over IMAP,
writes folders/messages over IMAP and (most importantly) with the
appropriate command line option can also copy over your subscriptions
list.
Because all of this is done over IMAP you then don't have to worry
about finding your old server's subscriptions file and mailbox
structure/formats and converting them: it "just works" and everything
ends up correctly in Dovecot's folders.
The only downsides are that imapsync is CPU-intensive, and can take
some (wall-clock) time. But we thought it was worth doing that way
for safety. :-)
Cheers, Mike B-)
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