Hi Michael

On 21/12/04, Michael Hipp (Michael@Hipp.com) wrote:

I just installed Dovecot and it is working great.

But I need subfolders. Does this mean I need to convert to Maildir format? I found several tools to do the conversion, but is there anything that needs to be changed in Dovecot to make the switch?

Have you had a look at the conf file?

In the current Debian testing version of Dovecot you will see:

# Default MAIL environment to use when it's not set. By leaving this # empty # dovecot tries to do some automatic detection as described in # /usr/share/doc/dovecot-common/mail-storages.txt. There's a few special # variables you can use: # # %u - username # %n - user part in user@domain, same as %u if there's no domain # %d - domain part in user@domain, empty if user there's no domain # %h - home directory # # You can also limit a width of string by giving the number of max. # characters # after the '%' character. For example %1u gives the first character of # username. Some examples: # # default_mail_env = maildir:/var/mail/%1u/%u/Maildir # default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/mail/%u # default_mail_env = mbox:/var/mail/%d/%n/:INDEX=/var/indexes/%d/%n

Read "Detecting what to use" in the mail-storages document. Dovecot checks to see if Maildir format is used and then falls back on mbox storage.

Have you checked your MTA (exim/postfix...) is delivering into maildir format?

Rory

Rory Campbell-Lange <rory@campbell-lange.net> <www.campbell-lange.net>

Michael Hipp wrote:

I just installed Dovecot and it is working great.

But I need subfolders. Does this mean I need to convert to Maildir format? I found several tools to do the conversion, but is there anything that needs to be changed in Dovecot to make the switch?

Technically, no, you do not need to change to Maildir. The limitation mbox places on folders is that they may only contain mailboxes and other folders, but NOT messages. Only mailboxes may contain messages.

That being said, I have seen far fewer bugs and struggles on this list from people using Maildir than mbox. :)

In my hunting I found various tools which claimed to be able to convert mbox to Maildir, but I was mostly trying to migrate people out of a Windows based "client saves all" setup... so in the end, it was, in fact, OE which was out greatest tool to migrating messages to IMAP/Maildir, and thus doing away with IE. (Thunderbird came a close second.)

A quick google on "mb2md" will likely turn up useful results.

Thank you, Michael Hipp

-- Curtis Maloney