[Dovecot] Pros and cons of having folders under INBOX vs. not
I have some questions about whether I should set up folders under INBOX vs. having them outside the INBOX namespace.
I'm setting up a new Dovecot 2.2.0 on an Ubuntu 12.04.2 server.
My plan is to move my users (family members) to this new server from an old Cyrus server.
Everybody is currently using (and will continue to use) IMAP, and either Thunderbird or SquirrelMail as their e-mail client.
I'm using the maildir mailbox format on this new Dovecot server.
No one is using the new Dovecot server yet, so I'm still free to do additional tweaking of the server configuration.
When I used imapsync to copy everyone's mail to the new server, I found that all the folders (other than INBOX) were renamed. On the old Cyrus server, all the folders are subfolders of INBOX, but the folders on the new Dovecot server are not. (For example, a folder named "INBOX.Dovecot" on the old server was renamed to "Dovecot" on the new server by the imapsync utility.)
Can I just keep things this way on the new server? Or are my users going to run into problems if folders are not all under INBOX? I do realize that IMAP servers can be set up either to put everything under INBOX, or not, but I'm not familiar with all the pros/cons.
And if I do need (or want) to put all the folders under INBOX, can I simply rename the existing folders in each user's Maildir (and also edit folder names accordingly in everyone's "subscriptions" file)? Or will Dovecot be broken unless I recopy everything from scratch (with a command-line option to imapsync to put everything in the INBOX destination namespace)?
Rich Wales richw@richw.org
On 4/18/2013 1:51 AM, Rich Wales wrote:
I have some questions about whether I should set up folders under INBOX vs. having them outside the INBOX namespace.
I'm setting up a new Dovecot 2.2.0 on an Ubuntu 12.04.2 server.
My plan is to move my users (family members) to this new server from an old Cyrus server.
Everybody is currently using (and will continue to use) IMAP, and either Thunderbird or SquirrelMail as their e-mail client.
I'm using the maildir mailbox format on this new Dovecot server.
No one is using the new Dovecot server yet, so I'm still free to do additional tweaking of the server configuration.
When I used imapsync to copy everyone's mail to the new server, I found that all the folders (other than INBOX) were renamed. On the old Cyrus server, all the folders are subfolders of INBOX, but the folders on the new Dovecot server are not. (For example, a folder named "INBOX.Dovecot" on the old server was renamed to "Dovecot" on the new server by the imapsync utility.)
Can I just keep things this way on the new server? Or are my users going to run into problems if folders are not all under INBOX? I do realize that IMAP servers can be set up either to put everything under INBOX, or not, but I'm not familiar with all the pros/cons.
It's a new server which requires a new MUA configuration, folder subscriptions, etc. Any mail sorting or other folder based MUA rules will have to be rewritten regardless. So the namespace hierarchy shouldn't really matter from a technical standpoint.
What matters is if your family members are able and, more importantly, willing, to adapt to a new namespace layout.
And if I do need (or want) to put all the folders under INBOX, can I simply rename the existing folders in each user's Maildir (and also edit folder names accordingly in everyone's "subscriptions" file)? Or will Dovecot be broken unless I recopy everything from scratch (with a command-line option to imapsync to put everything in the INBOX destination namespace)?
I don't think your directory renaming method will work, at least not in isolation. I think you'll still need to tweak your Dovecot namespace config.
-- Stan
participants (2)
-
Rich Wales
-
Stan Hoeppner