Following these instructions: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Zlib
I enabled zlib and restarted Dovecot. I made a backup copy of a 68MB mbox file and moved it to a non mail directory. The mbox file is an existing TBird IMAP folder in my UNIX user mail directory. It is an archive of a defunct mailing list. It was a regular IMAP folder prior to attempting this. I was able to access all emails in the folder. It worked fine. I gzipped the original mbox file down to 14MB and removed the write flag with chmod. I launched TBird and received the following error in Activity Manager when accessing this IMAP folder:
The current operation on '1-Spam-l' did not succeed. The mail server for account stan@hardwarefreak.com responded: Mailbox doesn't exist: 1-Spam-l
I deleted the Dovecot index files and the TBird 1-Spam-l.msf file which didn't help. Curiously, there are no entries in either dovecot.err or dovecot.log, giving not even the slightest hint as to where I should troubleshoot.
Kinda sucks when one follows instructions exactly, simple instructions at that, and it doesn't work, and generates zero log errors. A bit frustrating...
Any ideas?
/$ la /home/stan/mail/1-Spam-l.gz -r-------- 1 stan stan 14M Oct 28 2010 /home/stan/mail/1-Spam-l.gz
# 1.2.15: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf # OS: Linux 2.6.38.6 i686 Debian 6.0.3 xfs log_path: /var/log/dovecot.err info_log_path: /var/log/dovecot.log log_timestamp: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S protocols: imap ssl_parameters_regenerate: 0 disable_plaintext_auth: no login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login login_executable: /usr/lib/dovecot/imap-login login_process_per_connection: no login_process_size: 16 login_processes_count: 1 login_max_processes_count: 1 login_max_connections: 8 max_mail_processes: 4 mail_privileged_group: mail mail_location: mbox:/home/%u/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u mailbox_idle_check_interval: 15 mbox_write_locks: fcntl mbox_very_dirty_syncs: yes mbox_lazy_writes: no mail_plugins: fts fts_squat zlib imap_client_workarounds: tb-extra-mailbox-sep lda: postmaster_address: postmaster@hardwarefreak.com mail_plugins: sieve auth default: worker_max_count: 1 process_size: 16 passdb: driver: pam args: max_requests=1 userdb: driver: passwd plugin: fts: squat fts_squat: partial=4 full=10
-- Stan