[Dovecot] Migrating from mbox to maildir: Message ordering?

[Ian R. Justman]

Hi, all.

I have been playing with the notion of migrating some of my folders to 
maildir because it's a lot easier to manage that way from a reader 
standpoint.  The big question I have is how do I maintain message 
ordering in each folder?

When I use a mail program to do the migration from mbox to maildir, 
selecting "order received ascending", it works nicely, but one very 
small problem:  When I go to look at the newly-populated folder, 
everything is in reverse order.  I've tried it with T'bird and I've 
tried it with Pine.  Both yield the same results.  I'm thinking the 
issue might be with Dovecot.  Or is it a peculiarity with maildir?  Or 
am I better off using other means to convert a mbox folder to maildir?

I like maintaining the message delivery order so especially items like 
mailng list threads can (normally) flow right.  I don't always trust the 
message's date field because it CAN be faked (and sometimes is by the 
sender, whether accidental or intentional).

And while we're on the subject, since maildir's a file-per-message 
mailstore, what happens to ordering when you delete a message and a new 
message arrives?

However, otherwise, everything else is working beautifully.  I haven't 
gone into bashing the living hell out of it to make sure it REALLY works

The testing was done with Dovecot 1.0test62, Thunderbird 1.0, and Pine 
4.62.  Both mbox and maildir folderstores are on the same machine and 
Dovecot's configured to use both with a maildir in the user's directory, 
oddly enough, called "maildir", for their maildir store.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can render.

--Ian.