W/o downtime: see the wiki page below, the "Converting" section. Briefly for my case something like this should work and generally seems simple (no syntax checking yet, pseudo-code like):
- Configuration uses mail_location = mbox:~/mails
- setup per-user mail location and do for each user individually in a serial manner: -- doveadm sync maildir:~/Maildir; mbox is synced to Maildir, long running time -- doveadm sync maildir:~/Maildir; rerun to do it for new messages (fast) -- add USER to userdb and set extra field to maildir:~/Maildir users not present in the userdb should default to dovcot default; conditionally optional: doveadm auth cache flush -- doveadm kick (to force clients of USER to use the new Maildir) -- doveadm sync -R mbox:~/mails (rerun to sync the very last few mails, which arrived during the editing and reloading the userdb config)
- when done for all users, I set maildir:~/Maildir for mail location and remove the userdb file definition
The problem of postfix/procmail: procmail; https://wiki2.dovecot.org/HowTo/PostfixDovecotLMTP
- I found this, but I do not prefer edit procmail config this way http://dmc1961.id.au/howto_17101101.php
- I think that dovecot/lmpt is a better solution: -- dovecot takes care of the delivery and it will also know where to deliver during the mixed situation -- on the long term: told to have better performance compared to
On 2019. 01. 29. 19:49, Marc Roos wrote:
I am also migration away from mbox to in my case mdbox. I am not fully aware of something that allows you to do this without downtime.
To try to do as much as possible online, I have created an archive namespace and am moving the larger >5GB mbox files with old emails to that. So when the time is there to do convert active mailboxes, I have less to convert. Maybe this is helpful.
-----Original Message----- From: Tamas Hegedus [mailto:tamas@hegelab.org] Sent: 29 January 2019 17:39 To: dovecot@dovecot.org Subject: mbox 2 Maildir
Hi,
I am not an professional system admin, but I am running a small debian mail server for many years. It is time to migrate from mbox to Maildir. There is a nice and clean description for doing this without service downtime at https://wiki.dovecot.org/Tools/Doveadm/Sync I have to set per-user config for mailbox type using userdb extra fields.
However, I miss some information and I can not find useful info by google.
The main question: dovecot will know that for some users the mailbox format is still mbox, but others already have Maildir. I do not see any hint that I should setup postfix/procmail for handling the delivery per-user basis. But I think I have to set this, too.
I have not learned much about userdb and it seems that dovecot was written for and used by experts. I mean that the docs/wiki is not enough for me: from the wiki page of userdb it will be for me difficult to setup one. Can you suggest some docs for dummies?
Thanks for your help, Tamas
dovecot --version 2.2.27 (c0f36b0) postfix 3.1.8 procmail v3.23pre 2001/09/13
-- Tamas Hegedus, PhD Senior Research Fellow MTA-SE Molecular Biophysics Research Group Hungarian Academy of Sciences | phone: (36) 1-459 1500/60233 Semmelweis University | fax: (36) 1-266 6656 Tuzolto utca 37-47 | mailto:tamas@hegelab.org Budapest, 1094, Hungary | http://www.hegelab.org
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-- Tamas Hegedus, PhD Senior Research Fellow MTA-SE Molecular Biophysics Research Group Hungarian Academy of Sciences | phone: (36) 1-459 1500/60233 Semmelweis University | fax: (36) 1-266 6656 Tuzolto utca 37-47 | mailto:tamas@hegelab.org Budapest, 1094, Hungary | http://www.hegelab.org