Currently running dovecot 0.99.12 on a RHEL 3 server. This system used to use UW imap with mbox mailboxes, is now using dovecot with Maildir. (Actual user shell logins are not permitted.) Performance is tremendously improved. However, we still have users that have their client imap root set to the "mail" or "mail/" directory. (Can't reach/change them all easily.)

As a result, people are still (inadvertently) creating/using mbox-style mailboxes (sent mail folders most often) on the dovecot server (dovecot of course handles them without complaining) which grow and hurt server performance.

Now that we've figured this out, I think we could use mb2md in a script to convert these big mbox files to Maildir. (Is there a better way?)

But what would be the smart way to prevent people from creating these mbox files and still have their client work correctly with their imap root set to "mail"?

We currently use:

default_mail_env = maildir:~/Maildir

Thanks! -Adam