At 10AM +0200 on 13/12/12 you (Dale Gallagher) wrote:

Regarding the dovecot-uidlist header (first line) - I've tried to search for and figure out what exactly is meant by the "mailbox global uid" and once I do, how to manually generate the 128 bit hex variation of it? Could someone elaborate on this, please.

How would omitting the global uid field, beginning with G, affect remote clients' syncing of mail? Is this field mandatory? Would "3 V$uid_validity N$next_uid" be sufficient to ensure that clients don't re-download everything?

I also see that Dovecot's dovecot-uidvalidity is of the form 4df8a4e2, whereas the IMAP syncing utility which I'm using (isync) uses an integer. I'd appreciate it if someone could elaborate on what Dovecot uses and whether I need to convert one to the other (ie. after syncing with isync, do I need to convert it to work with Dovecot?

Have you tried using dsync instead of isync to copy the mailboxes across?

dsync -o mail_location=imapc: -o imapc_host=old.imap.server \
    -o imapc_user=USER -o imapc_password=PASSWORD \
    backup maildir:/home/user/Maildir

The last parameter is the destination for the copy, in mail_location format. This will (should) preserve all IMAP-visible information in the Dovecot index files. See also http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Migration/Dsync .

Ben