Alan Mead wrote:
> 1. Can I tar my ~/mail directory on serverX.com, untar it on a different
> physical serverY.com (initially with a different domain name), and still see
> my mail when I access imap.serverY.com <http://imap.serverY.com> (dovecot's
> running on serverY.com .. but let me know if there are any tricks that I
> need to make this work).

Sure can. Dovecot doesn't care where you mail came from, or who it was sent to.
Just that it's where you told it to look for it.

> One of the reasons I have question #1 is that the server name seems to be
> part of the email file names...
>
> amead:/home/amead> ls mail/cur | head -2
> 2022292282.22297_0.vulcan.rootr.net:2,S
> 2022312282.3225_0.vulcan.rootr.net:2,S

This is part of the Maildir naming algorithm, and is used to generate "unique"
message file names.

Curtis, many thanks for your reply! Clarification: Let's assume I'm a *complete moron* about email... Do I need to modify the naming of the files? Or is there anything else about moving these files that would be obvious to a non-moron, but not to me? It's really as simple as tar'ing them on the old server and untar'ing them on the new server!?

-Alan