• Jonathan Ryshpan jonrysh@pacbell.net:

On Sat, 2012-06-16 at 22:16 +0200, Patrick Ben Koetter wrote:

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• Jonathan Ryshpan jonrysh@pacbell.net:

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I need to import the mail database generated by the evolution mail reader into dovecot. Evolution stores its mail in maildir format (fully standards compatible, I think); I would be using the maildir format in dovecot. Is there anything in the wiki, etc. explaining exactly how to do this?

Why do this? Evolution is hopelessly broken, and is not likely to be fixed in the forseeable future, and I would like to keep my mails in maildir form. Reviews of kmail are very bad, and thunderbird uses the mbox format for storage.

If it is native maildir you can configure that/your account to use maildir and simply copy your mailbox over to Dovecot. When Dovecot accesses the mailbox it will create the necessary index files and you are ready to use it.

Sounds good.

I'm sure than when you write "mailbox", you mean the folders (and not the index files) in the evolution mail database, located at

Yes, I mean the folders and not the index files

~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local and whose contents start: $ ls -lA ..#evolution.Junk.cmeta .jango.ibex.index.data ..#evolution.Trash.cmeta .jfour/ ..cmeta .jfour.cmeta ..maildir++ .jfour.ibex.index .Drafts/ .jfour.ibex.index.data .Drafts.cmeta .joer/ .Outbox/ .joer.cmeta .Outbox.cmeta .joyce/ <...> and not $MAIL, i.e. /var/spool/mail/jonrysh, where mail arrives on the system (via fetchmail and local sendmail).

I don't mean $MAIL.

Please excuse me for double checking; evolution has archived 218,886 messages in 132 folders, and I want to avoid trouble if possible.

I am a friend of double checking. :)

p@rick

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On Sun, 2012-06-17 at 14:04 +0200, Wojciech Puchar wrote:

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maildir form. Reviews of kmail are very bad, and thunderbird uses the mbox format for storage.

If it is native maildir you can configure that/your account to use maildir and simply copy your mailbox over to Dovecot. When Dovecot accesses the mailbox it will create the necessary index files and you are ready to use it.

if you want to use any of those hopeless programs just turn message caching in them (folder synchronization off in thunderbird) and login to dovecot, even on localhost.

kmail v.3 is barely usable, v4 is good.

It looks like you don't like any of the email programs we've discussed. Which email programs do you like?

BTW: kmail on my system is 4.8.3 -- In more detail: $ kmail --version Qt: 4.8.2 KDE Development Platform: 4.8.3 (4.8.3) KMail: 4.8.3

Thanks - jon

On Sat, 2012-06-23 at 10:30 +0200, Wojciech Puchar wrote:

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kmail v.3 is barely usable, v4 is good.

It looks like you don't like any of the email programs we've discussed. Which email programs do you like?

it depends whether you ask what I personally use or what i recommend to my clients.

I personally use alpine exclusively. I don't like GUI interfaces. And i use alpine directly handling maildir so it's not about IMAP. But if you need mail client over IMAP - alpine can do this, but cannot cache.

mutt can cache if you like that program. i don't - in spite of much better functionality. alpine have lowest keypress to amount of word done ratio of any mail program i know.

For my clients it depends

• windoze: exclusively thunderbird. It's FAR FAR from perfect but still best you can get under windoze.

• X11 terminal based config: well... it's funny but too thunderbird. All QT based programs are useless with X11 over network. Thunderbird works fine. I disable "folder synchronization" as well as indexing in it, so it's acceptably fast. The need to connecting over localhost from account X to account X to dovecot-imap is quite stupid but not a problem.

For now it is thunderbird 10.0.5esr - both windows and FreeBSD

I want to be able to read and write HTML, since my correspondents use and expect it, so alpine is out. I had been happy with evolution, but it is now badly broken under KDE, and I am in process of changing to Thunderbird, as you see.

Thanks for the advice - jon

On Sat, 2012-06-16 at 22:16 +0200, Patrick Ben Koetter wrote:

• Jonathan Ryshpan jonrysh@pacbell.net:

...

I need to import the mail database generated by the evolution mail reader into dovecot. Evolution stores its mail in maildir format (fully standards compatible, I think); I would be using the maildir format in dovecot. Is there anything in the wiki, etc. explaining exactly how to do this?

Why do this? Evolution is hopelessly broken, and is not likely to be fixed in the forseeable future, and I would like to keep my mails in maildir form. Reviews of kmail are very bad, and thunderbird uses the mbox format for storage.

If it is native maildir you can configure that/your account to use maildir and simply copy your mailbox over to Dovecot. When Dovecot accesses the mailbox it will create the necessary index files and you are ready to use it.

I have now set up dovecot on my system, and should now be in business, but when Thunderbird connects to Dovecot it doesn't see any folders. Here is the situation. Please excuse the length of this message; I have tried to include all useful information.

My system is Fedora-17 Linux with all updates running on x86_64 hardware. Dovecot is installed and running with this configuration:

    $ dovecot -n
    # 2.1.7: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
    # OS: Linux 3.4.3-1.fc17.x86_64 x86_64 Fedora release 17 (Beefy Miracle) 
    mail_location = mbox:~/Dovecot:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
    mail_privileged_group = mail
    managesieve_notify_capability = mailto
    managesieve_sieve_capability = fileinto reject envelope encoded-character vacation subaddress comparator-i;ascii-numeric relational regex imap4flags copy include variables body enotify environment mailbox date ihave
    mbox_write_locks = fcntl
    namespace inbox {
      inbox = yes
      location = 
      mailbox Drafts {
        special_use = \Drafts
      }
      mailbox Junk {
        special_use = \Junk
      }
      mailbox Sent {
        special_use = \Sent
      }
      mailbox "Sent Messages" {
        special_use = \Sent
      }
      mailbox Trash {
        special_use = \Trash
      }
      prefix = 
    }
    passdb {
      driver = pam
    }
    plugin {
      sieve = ~/.dovecot.sieve
      sieve_dir = ~/sieve
    }
    ssl = required
    ssl_cert = </etc/pki/dovecot/certs/dovecot.pem
    ssl_key = </etc/pki/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem
    userdb {
      driver = passwd
    }

The folder ~/Dovecot contains a very large number of files and folers, which were all copied from the mail database of evolution, and consist of all the actual mail archived by evolution, but not its index files.

    $ ls -lA Dovecot
    total 4976
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .Drafts
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .Outbox
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .Sent
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .Tamburas
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .Templates
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .adax
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .ads
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .alissa
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .ally-bank
    ...
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .vicente
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .walgreens
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .wells
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .westwind
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Dec 31 10:36 .wview
    drwx------. 5 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 .yum
    -rw-------. 1 jonrysh jonrysh       0 Jun 22 18:10 Trash
    drwx------. 2 jonrysh jonrysh 4530176 Jun 22 13:31 cur
    drwx------. 2 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jul  6  2011 new
    drwx------. 2 jonrysh jonrysh    4096 Jun 22 13:31 tmp

Thunderbird reports that is can connect with the Dovecot imap server, but doesn't show any of these folders. It shows only the Folders Inbox and Trash. Clicking on Inbox causes the Thunderbird error message:

    The current operation on 'Inbox' did not succeed. The mail
    server for account jonrysh@localhost responded: [SERVERBUG]
    Internal error occurred. Refer to server log f…

and /var/log/maillog shows the corresponding error:

    Jun 22 18:23:10 amito dovecot: imap(jonrysh): Error: chown(/home/jonrysh/Dovecot/.imap/INBOX, group=12(mail)) failed: Operation not permitted (egid=1000(jonrysh), group based on /var/spool/mail/jonrysh - see http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Errors/ChgrpNoPerm)

As a complete Dovecot/IMAP newbie, I am completely confused. Any advice will be much appreciated.

jon