[Dovecot] Re: dovecot rpms, .subscriptions file, mbox to maildir

[Chris Hills]

Saurabh Barve wrote:
> So, are there newer version of dovecot (1.0-stable) available in rpm 
> formats which are guaranteed to be safe and un-trojaned? And is there 
> any really good reason why I should upgrade to 1.0-stable?

I maintain rpms for dovecot-1.0, which I build on Fedora Core 3. I 
provide all the build logs and source rpms, so you can build it yourself 
if you prefer. I have also added a few extra rebuild options which are 
not available in other rpms I have seen for dovecot-1.0.

The url is http://rpm.chaz6.com/?p=fedora/dovecot

At some point I will transfer these onto my work's domain (ne-worcs.ac.uk).

We are running 0.99 still, as there is no compelling reason to upgrade.

> 2) My second question is about creating the .subscriptions (or 
> subscriptions in 1.0) file. When I moved people over from using pine to 
> using a mail client like Evolution/Thunderbird, I had to create 
> .subscriptions/.mailboxlist file for them so that they could see the 
> folders that they had created in pine. However, people still sometimes 
> access e-mail using pine. They then create new folders in pine, which 
> they are unable to see in their mail client. Is there a way around it? 
> This occurs especially when people check their mail at the start of the 
> month, and pine asks about saving/deleting old sent-mail folders, Trash 
> folders. Is there a way to add these folders automagically to the 
> .subscriptions file?

Sorry, we only use IMAP clients, nothing that directly modifies mail 
boxes. It's less hassle that way. Perhaps you could configure pine to 
use IMAP instead.

> 3) Would I be able to support web mail using mailboxes in mbox format, 
> as I have them now? Or do I have to go for Maildir format? Since our 
> university introduced web mail, they have had two sets of folders - one 
> with capitalization (Sent, Deleted Messages, etc.) and one without 
> (sent-mail, etc. - these were from our pine days). Is this due to web mail?

How your mail server stores its mail should have no effect on the 
clients you use. As long as both your client and server support the same 
set of protocols, ie IMAP or POP3, you can use whatever combination you 
like.

The different sets of folders are due to the differing default locations 
for each client. You can probably change one or the other - if not, I'd 
suggest using different software! By default Microsoft Outlook Express 
and Mozilla Thunderbird use different folders for Sent Items. You can 
change one or the other so that you don't end up with two folders.

> Also, if I do need to convert from mbox to Maildir, what is the standard 
> tool for doing that? I saw at least three different tools/scripts for 
> doing that (mbox2maildir,mb2d,mb2md-2,mb2md.pl, .. ). Which tool (and 
> from where) should I use to convert mailboxes without problems?

In the past year I converted ~2000 mailboxes from mbox to maildir, using 
mb2md. It was definitely worth, as the server's load average is now 
usually <0.02, wheras before it was as high as 15. We have a lot of 
staff with huge mailboxes, which caused the problem.

Hope this is useful!

--
Chris Hills
IT Services
North East Worcestershire College