[Dovecot] newbie questions

[Jon Roma]

Stewart:

I am running (still non-production) dovecot 1.0 from the July 5 daily
snapshot under AIX 5.1 using JFS, with maildir mailboxes in a custom
location.

The timezone issue I posted to the list last week is the only problem
I've noticed to date.

Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:

> On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 10:32 -0400, Stewart Dean wrote:
>> Some questions I couldn't find answered in the docs:
>
> 1, 2 and 5 seem to be answered already, so I'll answer the rest two:
>
>> 3) on IBM's AIX Unix...
>> Q3: Is there anyone out there running DC on AIX?  5.x or 4.3.3?  JFS or
>> JFS2?
>
> There was just another mail about AIX having problems with timezones
> (Subject: Time zone problems with dovecot-1.0-stable (20050705 nightly
> snapshot)). Maybe look at how that thread continues if you have the same
> problem.
>
> One thing I've seen with Linux+JFS is that directory's mtime wasn't
> modified when new files were added to it, which broke maildir's new mail
> checks. But maybe this was a bug in some specific Linux version. If
> anyone is running JFS, I'd like to know if this problem still exists..
>
>> 4) Inbox location/format:
>> = I will want to move from our legacy .mbox format to, I suppose, the DC
>> default of Maildir++.
>> = I will want to do this in groups over time, rather than all at once,
>> so both formats will have to work
>> = The legacy location of INBOXes has been /var/spool/mail/<userid>.  The
>> docs appear to say that Maildir format INBOXes should be in ~/Maildir.
>> Q4:Can the INBOXes be in two location, the converted new Maildirs in ~,
>> and the old unconverted in vsm?  Or will I have to override the DC
>> cfg'ed INBOX location to be VSM until I get them all converted and then
>> move them all to ~/Maildir and change the DC config to that?
>
> One possibility is to let Dovecot autodetect the mailbox location. It
> checks for ~/Maildir first and ~/mail second. It's probably the easiest
> way, but if some users have created ~/Maildir accidentally you'll get
> into trouble.
>
> Another possibility is to specify separately for each user where their
> mails are stored. But if you're going to be using NIS as userdb, this
> isn't possible..
>
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/moin.cgi/Migration and
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/moin.cgi/Namespaces will also help how to do the
> change transparently to users.