[Dovecot] mbox to maildir conversion - good idea regarding Outlook?
Hi list,
first of all, many thanks to the Dovecot authors for supplying an IMAP server that works well with M$-Outlook! I have used UW-imapd for quite a while and was annoyed by frequent "imap...timeout..." error messages.
Now I'd like to give maildir format a try because I want to use email sub-folders. What are other Outlook users' experiences with maildir? Is it as stable as mbox?
Regards Gerhard
To: Gerhard Hofmann Funny you should ask... I just swung my box over from MBOX to MAILDIR and to be honest it works like a top. About the only issue I had was when I was experimenting with the IMAP portion of the server and Outlook XP/2000. With Outlook I received several 'timeout msgs' or 'not connected'. With the option below:
imap_client_workarounds = outlook-idle
I would just simply click on 'Connect' or 'Send/Receive' and I was good to go once more. Other than that, it ran like a top... Will L G
-----Original Message----- From: dovecot-bounces@dovecot.org [mailto:dovecot-bounces@dovecot.org] On Behalf Of Gerhard Hofmann Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 8:13 AM To: dovecot@dovecot.org Subject: [Dovecot] mbox to maildir conversion - good idea regarding Outlook?
Hi list,
first of all, many thanks to the Dovecot authors for supplying an IMAP server that works well with M$-Outlook! I have used UW-imapd for quite a while and was annoyed by frequent "imap...timeout..." error messages.
Now I'd like to give maildir format a try because I want to use email sub-folders. What are other Outlook users' experiences with maildir? Is it as stable as mbox?
Regards Gerhard
DiskMan wrote:
To: Gerhard Hofmann Funny you should ask... I just swung my box over from MBOX to MAILDIR and to be honest it works like a top.
I suppose you have used this script http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/ as described in the Dovecot WIKI for the conversion?
Regards Gerhard
On Mon, 2006-02-20 at 16:28 +0100, Gerhard Hofmann wrote:
DiskMan wrote:
To: Gerhard Hofmann Funny you should ask... I just swung my box over from MBOX to MAILDIR and to be honest it works like a top.
I suppose you have used this script http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/ as described in the Dovecot WIKI for the conversion?
BTW. Nowadays Dovecot includes its own conversion tool also, which might work better than mb2md. Usage is something like:
src/plugin/convert-tool user /home/user mbox:/home/user/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u maildir:/home/user/Maildir
It converts all mailboxes and you can convert between any two formats. Everything is read and written through Dovecot's normal functions, so it can use existing indexes to speed things up, and it also writes the indexes to destination mailboxes while converting.
convert plugin can also be run as imap/pop3/lda plugin where it converts the mailboxes the first time user logs in or new mail is delivered to user.
After conversion the old mail directory is renamed to mail-converted directory (eg. /home/user/mail -> /home/user/mail-converted).
man, 20,.02.2006 kl. 18.54 +0200, skrev Timo Sirainen:
BTW. Nowadays Dovecot includes its own conversion tool also, which might work better than mb2md. Usage is something like:
src/plugin/convert-tool user /home/user mbox:/home/user/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u maildir:/home/user/Maildir
It converts all mailboxes and you can convert between any two formats. Everything is read and written through Dovecot's normal functions, so it can use existing indexes to speed things up, and it also writes the indexes to destination mailboxes while converting.
But there is at least one "bug" with this; you should convert .'s in mbox names to underscore or something, else it looks weird. Other than that, it seems to work fine :)
-Stian
Timo Sirainen wrote:
BTW. Nowadays Dovecot includes its own conversion tool also, which might work better than mb2md. Usage is something like:
src/plugin/convert-tool user /home/user mbox:/home/user/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u maildir:/home/user/Maildir
Hi,
haven't found convert-tool on my Debian box (I used apt-get to install everything...), so I tried mb2md for a test account as described in the WIKI.
Output of mb2md and also resulting Maildir directory and files looked to me like everything worked, but now Thunderbird doesn't show the mailboxes that were converted from mbox to maildir.
Right now, I haven't set default_mail_env in dovecot.conf as everything was detected automatically.
Of course, I could set default_mail_env but I don't want to convert all users to maildir before having seen it works for one specific testing account.
Can I set default_mail_env on a per use base? Will I have to use namespaces?
TIA Gerhard
On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 06:54:18PM +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Mon, 2006-02-20 at 16:28 +0100, Gerhard Hofmann wrote:
DiskMan wrote:
To: Gerhard Hofmann Funny you should ask... I just swung my box over from MBOX to MAILDIR and to be honest it works like a top.
I suppose you have used this script http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/ as described in the Dovecot WIKI for the conversion?
BTW. Nowadays Dovecot includes its own conversion tool also, which might work better than mb2md. Usage is something like:
src/plugin/convert-tool user /home/user mbox:/home/user/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u maildir:/home/user/Maildir
It converts all mailboxes and you can convert between any two formats. Everything is read and written through Dovecot's normal functions, so it can use existing indexes to speed things up, and it also writes the indexes to destination mailboxes while converting.
convert plugin can also be run as imap/pop3/lda plugin where it converts the mailboxes the first time user logs in or new mail is delivered to user.
After conversion the old mail directory is renamed to mail-converted directory (eg. /home/user/mail -> /home/user/mail-converted).
I'm trying to manually run today's CVS of convert-tool on a Solaris 9 system (a system where I'm successfully running Dovecot itself). Here's an example of what I'm trying:
./convert-tool bozo /home/bozo
mbox:/home/bozo/Mail/:INBOX=/home/bozo/.inbox maildir:/home/bozo/Maildir
When I run this in a case where ~bozo/.inbox *does* exist, but ~bozo/Mail does *not*, then convert-tool displays "Info: Successfully converted." In this case, however, ~bozo/Maildir is created with the cur,new,tmp infrastructure for INBOX, but it's otherwise empty.
When I run this in a case where both ~bozo/Mail and ~bozo/.inbox exist, I receive the error:
Fatal: flock() locks not supported (see lock_method setting in config file)
In this case, ~bozo/Maildir has the empty infrastructure for INBOX and also an empty infrastructure for the first folder in ~bozo/Mail. I'm also left with a stale ~bozo/.dovecot.convert.lock file
I *am* selecting fcntl in dovecot.conf, but convert-tool doesn't appear to be reading the config file. If I want to use convert-tool as a command-line utility, do I need to run it through the master dovecot program in some way?
Attached is truss output, in case it helps.
Thanks, Glenn
On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 12:35:00 -0500 Glenn Leavell wrote:
I'm trying to manually run today's CVS of convert-tool on a Solaris 9 system (a system where I'm successfully running Dovecot itself). Here's an example of what I'm trying:
./convert-tool bozo /home/bozo
mbox:/home/bozo/Mail/:INBOX=/home/bozo/.inbox maildir:/home/bozo/MaildirWhen I run this in a case where ~bozo/.inbox *does* exist, but ~bozo/Mail does *not*, then convert-tool displays "Info: Successfully converted." In this case, however, ~bozo/Maildir is created with the cur,new,tmp infrastructure for INBOX, but it's otherwise empty.
When I run this in a case where both ~bozo/Mail and ~bozo/.inbox exist, I receive the error:
Fatal: flock() locks not supported (see lock_method setting in config file)
In this case, ~bozo/Maildir has the empty infrastructure for INBOX and also an empty infrastructure for the first folder in ~bozo/Mail. I'm also left with a stale ~bozo/.dovecot.convert.lock file
I *am* selecting fcntl in dovecot.conf, but convert-tool doesn't appear to be reading the config file. If I want to use convert-tool as a command-line utility, do I need to run it through the master dovecot program in some way?
Attached is truss output, in case it helps.
I *just* converted everything here over to maildir and ended up not using this method because convert-tool doesn't seem to be reading the dovecot.conf file (at least in beta3). Since you mention truss and your error message looks exactly like mine, I'm going to make the leap that you too are using Solaris, which doesn't have flock(), and without some sort of change convert-tool won't work...
I would have tried to debug it but unfortunately my conversion window was on top of me and I ended up justing using mb2md for all 5900 of my users <sigh type=heavy>.
Regards,
-Jeff
--
Jeff Ballard ballard@engr.wisc.edu 608-265-5090 Unix Systems Manager, Computer-Aided Engineering Center
participants (6)
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DiskMan
-
Gerhard Hofmann
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Glenn Leavell
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Jeff Ballard
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Stian Jordet
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Timo Sirainen