Alan Mead wrote:

1. Can I tar my ~/mail directory on serverX.com, untar it on a different physical serverY.com (initially with a different domain name), and still see my mail when I access imap.serverY.com http://imap.serverY.com (dovecot's running on serverY.com .. but let me know if there are any tricks that I need to make this work).

Sure can. Dovecot doesn't care where you mail came from, or who it was sent to. Just that it's where you told it to look for it.

2. If I maintain large mailboxes and check my mail frequently, how does the dovecot server load compare to something like apache or Samba?

Apples and oranges, in many ways. I have all three running on the same server, and the IMAP loads are incidental. But then, so are the Samba loads, most of the time. This is just a 25person company, and the only thing on the server that will cause significant loads is Apache w/ mod_python (which isn't doing much, yet, anyway). (The server in this instance is a Sun V100 - 650MHz UltraSPARC-IIi, 1G RAM, 80GB ATA HDD).

I ask because I have a vanity domain that I mostly use for email and I want to ensure that I can migrate my precious emails to a new service provider. And the provider that I'm considering offers low-cost virtual dedicated servers but meters usage (including RAM and CPU).

Well, I would recommend Dovecot over the other majors IMAPds in this case. Anecdotal evidence on this list suggests it will cause about 1/10 the load.

One of the reasons I have question #1 is that the server name seems to be part of the email file names...

amead:/home/amead> ls mail/cur | head -2 2022292282.22297_0.vulcan.rootr.net:2,S 2022312282.3225_0.vulcan.rootr.net:2,S

This is part of the Maildir naming algorithm, and is used to generate "unique" message file names.

-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net