Correct procedure to convert Maildir format to Mdbox
Hi, I need to migrate mail from a shared hosting that stores mail in the Maildir format to another one that uses the Mdbox format.
Both hosts use Dovecot, though I don't know what version, because neither has Dovecot command line/ssh utilities available. So I installed Debian 10.9 + Dovecot-imapd (ver.2.3.4.1 stable), then in "/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf" I changed "mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u" to "mail_location = mdbox:~/mdbox" and "#separator =" to "separator = /" . I moved the contents of the folder containing the mail in Maildir format to ~/Maildir/ and then I ran "dsync -v -u user mirror maildir:~/Maildir/".
The only users on the system are root and a limited priviledges user, but on the Debian server I didn't recreate any mail account/user that existed on the source server. The conversion command is executed without showing errors: the resulting ~/mdbox folder has a size of 370 MB while the ~/Maildir/ folder was 456 MB. I would like to know if the procedure I followed is correct and if the absence of errors when the command is executed means that the conversion was successful, or if I need to do some other test/check to make sure the whole conversion process is ok. Thank you.
On 09/06/2021 00:10 Marco Usai ddr2pw@yahoo.com wrote:
Hi,
I need to migrate mail from a shared hosting that stores mail in the Maildir format to another one that uses the Mdbox format.
Both hosts use Dovecot, though I don't know what version, because neither has Dovecot command line/ssh utilities available.
So I installed Debian 10.9 + Dovecot-imapd (ver.2.3.4.1 stable), then in "/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf" I changed "mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u" to "mail_location = mdbox:~/mdbox" and "#separator =" to "separator = /" . I moved the contents of the folder containing the mail in Maildir format to ~/Maildir/ and then I ran "dsync -v -u user mirror maildir:~/Maildir/".
The only users on the system are root and a limited priviledges user, but on the Debian server I didn't recreate any mail account/user that existed on the source server.
The conversion command is executed without showing errors: the resulting ~/mdbox folder has a size of 370 MB while the ~/Maildir/ folder was 456 MB.
I would like to know if the procedure I followed is correct and if the absence of errors when the command is executed means that the conversion was successful, or if I need to do some other test/check to make sure the whole conversion process is ok.
Thank you.
Yep. That's a good way to do the conversion. See https://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/MailFormat for details.
Aki
participants (2)
-
Aki Tuomi
-
Marco Usai