Re: [Dovecot] migrating from mbox to maildir

On Saturday, November 24 at 10:13 PM, quoth mouss:

...

If for some reason you are completely stuck with 0.99.x, then yes, changing to Maildir format is pretty easy, and there are plenty of conversion scripts out there in the world. Just ask Google. Keep in mind if the real problem is some bug in Centos that prevents Dovecot from using locks, then the Maildir conversion may not help much, because Maildir (in Dovecot) uses locks as well.

why lock?

To quote the Dovecot wiki (http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir):

 Although maildir was designed to be lockless, Dovecot locks the
 maildir while doing modifications to it or while looking for new
 messages in it. This is required because otherwise Dovecot might
 temporarily see mails incorrectly deleted, which would cause
 trouble. Basically the problem is that if one process modifies the
 maildir (eg. a rename() to change a message's flag), another
 process in the middle of listing files at the same time could skip
 a file. The skipping happens because readdir() system call doesn't
 guarantee that all the files are returned if the directory is
 modified between the calls to it. This problem exists with all the
 commonly used filesystems.

~Kyle

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. -- Fr. Theodpre Hesburgh