Hello list,
I recently migrated to Dovecot from a very old version of IceWarp running on failing hardware running Windows XP. I had a lot of issues downloading mail through imap. What I have instead are the email files directly off the harddrive from IceWarp's mail store.
I rearranged the mail files to look like a Dovecot maildir and tried to use these emails directly. Dovecot did not complain, but I ran into my first problem. The emails were out of order on the client side. None of my imap clients store email. They all just fetch headers and download mail as it's required. So a resync is not a problem. I just can't figure out how and I don't know if the filenames are a problem.
The files I'm working with have this format:
2020032512105639B0-000001000000D2D45079615C.imap
The first part is the date and all the the filenames appear to be unique. Is it okay to leave them this way or should I rename them in the same fashion as Dovecot? If so, is there a tool I can use or do I need to write a script? If I have to write a script, could someone help me decipher this filename:
1585197800.M440284P10160.hostname,S=2812,W=2875:2,S
I understand the first bit is a unix timestamp. I couldn't find out what M440284P10160 means or how I might create that number myself to use in a renaming script. Additionally, I'd like to customise the hostname without changing the machine's hostname and I understand that the S and W can also be omitted. I'm not using quotas. I couldn't find anywhere in the documentation where it talked about any configuration options for the filenames. Are there any or do I have to patch the source?
I was also planning on directly backing up the email using rsync, but the changing filenames with flags is obviously an issue. I understand that dovecot can store flags in a file instead, if the mailbox is shared or public. Is there any way to have this behaviour with a private mailbox? Ideally the filenames are not touched after creation in which case rsync will work nicely to my NAS.
The last issue is that since Dovecot went live, I've started receiving mail. For the time being, I have left my "yet to be migrated" mail outside of maildir. So Dovecot doesn't know about it. I will need to merge this newly received mail with my "yet to migrated mail" once I sort out exactly how to migrate that mail. And I would really like all the mail to sort properly.
From what I can tell doveadm is the tool for the job, but I just can't make sense of the documentation.
Thanks, Stef
Dovecot version: 2.3.4.1 (f79e8e7e4)