[Dovecot] preserving pop3 mail uids

[Timo Sirainen]

On Thu, 2006-04-06 at 10:40 +1000, adcx at server101.com wrote:
> Is there some way that message uids can be preserved when converting uw-pop3 mbox mail to dovecot maildir format?
> We've tried perfect_maildir, mb2md and the convert-tool that comes with dovecot but so far have been unable to preserve 
> the message uids, which for example go from 44333a8500000003 before the conversion to 4434621500000003 afterwards. 
> The quantity of mailboxes involved means forcing users to re-pop old emails left on the server isn't an option. Any help appreciated.

If you can preserve the messages' UID values (ie. X-UID header needs to
be moved to correct entry in dovecot-uidlist file), then it's easy.
Besides UID you'll have to preserve UIDVALIDITY (in X-IMAPbase or X-IMAP
header, move to first line in dovecot-uidlist).

After this, you can use pop3_uidl_format = %08Xv%08Xu

Unfortunately I don't know of any conversion tool that preserves the
UIDs. I thought for a while about doing it in convert-tool, but it'd
require pretty large changes to Dovecot.

And as Grant said, another way would be X-UIDL headers, but you'd need
to also create them properly to the mbox files (so the mails really have
"X-UIDL: 44333a8500000003" header), so that they get moved into the
maildir files as well.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20060409/c6774e1f/attachment-0001.pgp