Jochen Schulz ml@well-adjusted.de writes:
Kendall Shaw:
I expected dovecot to take the mail out of the mbox file and put it somewhere.
Why should it do this? Dovecot normally tries to automatically detect where your mailboxes are and if it finds them in one of the usual places (for example your /var/mail/user) it uses this location.
To be able to create folders and such that mbox doesn't describe and IMAP does maybe. In anycase, I wonder if you have more advice for me about converting to maildir.
But, I see there's a big mbox file (/var/mail/me) that keeps growing. Is dovecot using that as the store of messages?
Probably. Why don't you take a look?
I've taken a look at the file and no thoughts appeared while I was doing that.
I see there is both the file in /var/mail/me and in /home/me/.dovecot there are a number of files that seem to correspond to the IMAP folders.
In dovecot.conf I have:
default_mail_env = mbox:~/.dovecot/:INBOX=/var/mail/me
It was unclear to me if the directory other than the one labeled INBOX was required. I was guessing that dovecot might take the messages out of the inbox and put them into the other path.
If I were to move to using maildir instead of mbox, what is going to happen to my existing mail?
Nothing. You would have to move your mboxes to maildir yourself. You can use programs like mb2md to do that.
Thanks for this advice. I used mb2md to create a Maildir directory using:
mb2md -m mb2md -s /var/mail/me -R
I also changed dovecot.conf to use:
default_mail_env = maildir:~/Maildir
And changed exim to use Maildir instead of my mbox file, using the lines in the example for debian on the dovecot main page.
The result is that I get no mail. The log file looks essentially the same with some variations.
Using mbox, logging in looks like:
Feb 8 14:42:52 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): Effective uid=1000, gid=1000 Feb 8 14:42:52 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): mbox: data=/home/me/.dovecot/:INBOX=/var/mail/me Feb 8 14:42:52 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): mbox: root=/home/me/.dovecot, index=/home/me/.dovecot, inbox=/var/mail/me
Using maildir, logging in looks like:
Feb 8 14:34:11 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): Effective uid=1000, gid=1000 Feb 8 14:34:11 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): maildir: data=/home/me/Maildir Feb 8 14:34:11 pokey dovecot: IMAP(me): maildir: root=/home/me/Maildir, index=/home/me/Maildir, control=, inbox=
Do I need to indicate where the inbox is somehow in default_mail_env?
Kendall