Patrick: thanks a lot!
So it's not enough to do a 'backup', it's also necessary to 'sync' the mailboxes, but using the old mail_location, that is
mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
Otherwise the command doesn't find the mailbox. It said source and destination were the same! That was one of many errors I was getting.
I had tried using '-o mail_location=/var/mail/' but also got errors and wasn't able to transfer the emails. I finally restored mail_location to it's former value, restarted dovecot, and it worked!
I wasn't aware that I had first to backup and then sync to transfer all emails.
Thanks again! Best regards
Kenneth
On Sun, 5 Feb 2023, Patrick Domack wrote:
#copy mailbox, using new mail_location setting doveadm backup -u "${USER}" maildir:/home/${USERNAME}/Maildir/ doveadm sync -u "${USER}" maildir:/home/${USERNAME}/Maildir/
#Update user to use maildir instead of old method, update sql? .... mail_location=maildir:/home/${USERNAME}/Maildir/
doveadm auth cache flush doveadm proxy kick "${USER}"
#copy any late additions to mailbox, using old mail_location setting doveadm sync -u "${USER}" mbox:/var/mail/${USERNAME}
#remove old format mailbox rm /var/mail/${USERNAME}
I do this one user at a time, then when done adjust my config file, and remove the mail_location setting from sql, though my script has a few other fixups and error checking
Quoting Kenneth Irving ken@fq.edu.uy:
Hello. I have an email server for testing purposes, using postfix 3.5.17 and dovecot 2.3.13.
Initially, I configured postfix to use mailboxes, but now I've changed it to maildir.
Emails arrive fine, and dovecot manages them well by pop3 or imap. No problems there.
But I still have a lot of emails in different mailboxes which I'd like to convert to maildir.
I found mb2md, which seems to do a pretty good job. Once the mailbox is converted, dovecot manages the emails without a problem.
But I also wanted to learn how to use doveadm to convert mailboxes to maildir format.
I read all the documentation I could find and tried to learn how this command works. I tried different combinations, but couldn't convert mailboxes to maildir. I always get error messages. I've been unable to understand why.
I tried to sync, backup, and import, to no avail. I also tried dsync, which seems to have a different syntax, with the same result.
Sorry for bothering you, but if you could explain to me how this command works, I'd be very grateful.
Example: I have a user, let's say joe, who has a mailbox in /var/mail/joe and I'd like to transfer those emails to /home/joe/Maildir
How do I use doveadm in this situation?
Best regards
Kenneth