On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 22:55, Eric S. Johansson wrote:

...

Next Dovecot version will support both mboxes and maildir. That could do it at least one mailbox at a time.

I wonder if we're both envisioning the same thing?

I think you were talking about two things - mbox2maildir script first and then the automatic thingy.

in addition to my ramblings above, seems to me that might be more practical to specify a "magic" directory addition to the imap directory representation which contains the hierarchy of mbox files which would allow users to copy and then delete mboxes to convert formats.

That's what I meant with being possible with next version:

namespace private { separator = / prefix = #mbox/ location = mbox:~/mail }

...

We'd need a Python plugin :) I don't think it was difficult to export C stuff from .h files to Python using some tool .. which I can't remember anymore.

http://psyco.sourceforge.net/

but it's not all that you need. You want to embed python in dovecot and find a way to invoke dovecot functions mailbox from python.

I was thinking about SWIG. http://www.swig.org/

You'd mostly just need to convert src/lib-storage/mail-storage.h, imap/client.h and imap/commands-util.h. Maybe some of lib-imap/*.h and lib-mail/*.h

On Thu, 2003-08-28 at 12:26, Grahame Bowland wrote:

Do dovecot plugins run as seperate processes and communicate with some sort of IPC, or do they run within the same process as the main server? If they run within a plugin would need to embed the actual interpreter.

They run within the server. I don't think there's much point in separating them into other processes. So yes, you'd need embedded interpreter but I don't think that's much of a problem.

By the way, I converted over UWA's student email server to dovecot from UW-IMAP and cucipop last night. Relatively few problems, which I've now fixed with some tweaks to the config.

Nice :)

The only outstanding problem is these assertions I keep getting in the logs: Aug 28 17:03:51 tartarus imap(mpienaar): file mbox-rewrite.c: line 429 (mbox_write_header): assertion failed: (hdr_parsed_size.physical_size == hdr_size)

Does the assertion indicate a corrupted mailbox file? I can open that user's mailbox fine with mutt. It's dovecot 0.99.10-5 from Debian.

I heard about similiar problem before too.. I couldn't really figure out what it was that caused the problem. I've never seen it myself and I've been using mboxes all the time.

What that error message means is that message header size is different when rewriting mbox than what it was at last synchronization. But since the syncing is done just before the rewriting, that should never happen. Except if there's a bug somewhere..

If it's possible I would like to see that mbox file. Actually it could be enough if you just hide the actual content in it. Here's a pretty perl script for that:

perl -e 'while (<>) { if (/^From ([^ ]*) *(.*)$/) { $hdr = 1; print "From foo@bar.org $2\n"; } elsif ($hdr) { if (/^$/) { $hdr = 0; print "\n"; } elsif (/^Date:/i || /^Status:/i || /^X-Status:/i || /^X-Keywords:/i || /^X-UID:/i || /^X-IMAPbase:/i || /^Content-Length/i) { print $_; } else { s/^([^:]+:) (.*)/("$1 "."X"x length($2))/e; print $_; } } else { s/./B/g; print $_; } }' < inbox

We are also considering leaving UW-IMAP in favour of dovecot, I would be very gratefull if you would care to share your tweaks to the config with us?

At the risk of sounding too ridiculous:

ditto, I'd like to see those tweaks too.

-sv

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Am Dienstag, 26. August 2003 21:55 schrieb Eric S. Johansson:

then, if the mbox file was the only mailbox, its contents would be converted to maildir and the mbox file would be moved to a "junk" directory

Why don't you convert your mbox files using formail and procmail?

Greetings,

Gunter

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Bob Hall wrote:

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Why don't you convert your mbox files using formail and procmail?

Because I don't know how. Can you post a script? or guidelines and suggestions?

It's mind-numbingly easy.

As for getting the mail into Procmail, that's where Formail comes in. You tell it to parse the mailbox, spitting out one message at a time, which you then feed back into Procmail which goes by your rules. As it goes, it'll then re-deliver based on your rules.

This example is based directly from the set of examples from Formail's man page:

cat mailbox | formail -ds procmail

With your Procmail recipes, follow your mailbox name with a slant, e.g.:

:0:

• 1^0 ^Return-Path:.*dovecot-bounces@procontrol.fi
• 1^0 ^Return-Path:.*dovecot-bounce@procontrol.fi

/home/ianj/maildir/dovecot/

This one is based on a real recipe which on my system does a mbox by month, augmented to deliver to a maildir.

and bingo! Any subsequent mail will be delivered to a maildir. The cool part is that you don't have to do anything special beforehand.

For a main inbox, you'd remove the condition lines, and of course, specify the path to the directory (followed by a slant to tell Procmail that you want maildir delivery).

Though one of the other people on the list mentioned wanting to be able to make maildir the system-wide default mailbox format for users' inboxes, which of course can be overridden in ~/.procmailrc. Any thoughts on this one? I may move my inbox to a maildir format while all my mailing list traffic will be filed in monthly mbox files since I rarely make any writes to those files from my MUA to begin with.

--Ian.

On Thu, 2003-08-28 at 13:01, Nicolas STRANSKY wrote:

...

Next Dovecot version will support both mboxes and maildir. That could do it at least one mailbox at a time.

Do you mean that with the actual stable version (99.10) it is not possible to handle both maildir and mailbox imap folders for the same account ?

Yep. It didn't need that much changes, but I hadn't bothered to do that until now.