Well, that's exactly what we did! One of the reasons for choosing Dovecot was that it was a drop-in replacement. There a couple of caveats though:
- Folder subscriptions
UW-IMAP stores these in a file called .mailboxlist as opposed to Dovecot's .subscriptions, and also includes the folder prefix for each subscribed folder.
I think most migrators have just copied .mailboxlist to .subscriptions, which is fine as long as you don't mind possible minor issues with adding/removing subscriptions afterwards (we hacked Dovecot a bit to keep the prefix, and to use .mailboxlist so it was easy to switch back and forth without losing subscriptions)
Try to avoid Dovecot and UW-IMAP opening the same folder at the same time (Dovecot would probably cope, but UW-IMAP would get upset)
mbx-format mailboxes need to be converted to mailbox
There's also some info in the Wiki, I think, about it.
I was a bit paranoid and set up a duplicate delivery mechanism (easy in Exim) to deliver messages to a separate folder that I tried not to open with Dovecot, just in case it corrupted something (I used a script using UW-IMAP mailutil to prune messages older than 7 days from it). Having said that, I didn't see any corruption problems.
Hope this helps, Chris
Daniel Watts wrote:
Chris Wakelin wrote:
Server: Sun Fire 480, 4xUltraSparcIII 900Mhz Storage: Sun 1xT3 + 1xT4 arrays (Fibre Channel + RAID5) OS: Solaris 8 RAM: 8GB Number of Users: ~20,000 mostly IMAP Authentication: Active Directory via PAM and pam_ldap Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 3 Email client software: various, mostly Outlook/Outlook Express and Prayer Webmail Mailboxes sizes: ~375GB inboxes 800GB folders
Migrated from UW-IMAP in September with spectacular improvement in performance!
Chris
Hi Chris,
Just wondering - is it possible to install Dovecot on the same server as UW IMAP but listening on a different port? Will the installation of Dovecot mess up any of UW's files/libraries?
I'd like to try running them side by side first so that I can get Dovecot configured properly 'in-place' then switch off UW and have Dovecot listen on 143.
I'm just nervous about installing Dovecot on the server and corrupting UW somehow!
Daniel
-- --+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+- Christopher Wakelin, c.d.wakelin@reading.ac.uk IT Services Centre, The University of Reading, Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439 Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094