When we upgraded from uw-imapd to dovecot 0.99, and then over to the 1.0 series (which is FAR better than 0.99 which was light years ahead of uw-imapd), we bumped in to a similar problem in our testing environment.

The end result was that the .mailboxlist, which was used by uw-imapd needed to be migrated over to .subscriptions for dovecot 1.0rc-something. Having both files in place really caused some confusion since older versions of dovecot supported .mailboxlist (if I remember correctly). However, once the files were sorted out, Thunderbird, Outlook, IMP (horde), all were able to see the same subscribed folders without forcing any user to re-subscribe.

-Rich

[Sending this again from the email account that I actually have subscribed to the list - hopefully won't be a dup...]

We have been running dovecot-0.99.11-2.EL4.rpm on CentOS4 (since that's the latest that ships with RHEL/CentOS) for a while. Aalso in parallel, we have been running various 1.0 betas and RCs on a different port for a different set of more test-tolerant users.

This weekend, I upgraded to 1.0.rc7, and made all users use this. I found a small issue.

All our users have a large set of folders in their Maildir. For the users who got upgraded from 0.99.11 to 1.0.rc7 (well, the one user who accessed their mail so far since the upgrade...) their folders weren't showing up in Thunderbird any more.

Deleting all the dovecot-* files in the Maildir didn't help.

In the end, the user re-subscribed to all the folders and then they showed up. (FYI, this is a right-click operation on the account in the Thunderbird tree view, subscribe menu option, then re-check all the folder names).

Is there anything that can be implemented in 1.0.rc7 so that users don't have to manually re-subscribe to everything, so the upgrade process in this situation is a little more transparent?

Is this simply a matter of the different Dovecot versions naming the folders with different UUIDs (or whatever the IMAP protocol uses), or something else?