Troy Engel wrote:

I'm reading the wiki et el. regarding indexes, but can't come up with a coherent answer to the setup and what will happen. I want to take the indexes and move them off of NFS (~/Maildir) and place in /var/spool/dovecot/indexes, but not have to hand create everything (user homes, mail folders)

So, I create a parent folder /var/spool/dovecot/indexes that has the appropriate permissions for writing by all users/dovecot. If I then set:

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:INDEX=/ovar/spol/dovecot/indexes/%1u/%u

...will the dovecot daemon(s) automagically create (A) the parent user folders (i.e. .../indexes/t/tengel/)(1), and (B) the necessary subfolders for all the child folder indexes? (i.e. .../tengel/.Lists.Dovecot/)

It will, but beware... all directories will be created as the user's uid and gid. So, if you use a different uid for each user, you should manually create the /var/spool/dovecot/indexes/%1u directories first with the proper ownership and permissions. Otherwise, when /var/spool/dovecot/indexes/a gets created for user abc, it will be owned by abc and creation of /var/spool/dovecot/indexes/a/asmith by user asmith will fail.

If you're using the same uid for everyone, you don't need to worry about it. On the other hand, if you're really doing just a one character hash, is there a good reason not to just create the dirs ahead of time? :) I'm doing a more complex hash, and have different uids, so I had to write a script to make the directory structure. Just wanted to save you a little possible time.

Most of the doc info seems to revolve around moving your indexes if you use mbox, I'm a little fuzzy on what happens with Maildir when you attempt this.

thanks! -te

(1) in our setup, initially user's home folders are created on an admin server -> NFS that is not the mail server, so Dovecot needs to create the home & index folders on it's own at runtime.