At 5PM +0100 on 9/04/13 you (David Woodhouse) wrote:

Once upon a time I could configure my mailer to access my historical archives by running something like

ssh $mailserver MAIL=maildir:~/Maildir-archive dovecot --exec-mail imap

I need to run /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap manually now, and I've fixed that a while ago for my normal email access. But I've just had cause to go back to my archives for the first time in a while... and realised that I don't know how to make it work any more.

When invoking /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap, is there an environment variable or command line option which can set the mail location?

I don't know about an environment variable, but you can use the -o option to set configuration variables in the dovecot.conf format:

/usr/libexec/dovecot/imap -o mail_location=maildir:~/Maildir-archive

Ben