[Dovecot] unofficial Survey about your Dovecot server :) to compare with my own server setup...

[Chris Wakelin]

Well, that's exactly what we did! One of the reasons for choosing 
Dovecot was that it was a drop-in replacement. There a couple of caveats 
though:

1) Folder subscriptions

UW-IMAP stores these in a file called .mailboxlist as opposed to 
Dovecot's .subscriptions, and also includes the folder prefix for each 
subscribed folder.

I think most migrators have just copied .mailboxlist to .subscriptions, 
which is fine as long as you don't mind possible minor issues with 
adding/removing subscriptions afterwards (we hacked Dovecot a bit to 
keep the prefix, and to use .mailboxlist so it was easy to switch back 
and forth without losing subscriptions)

2) Try to avoid Dovecot and UW-IMAP opening the same folder at the same 
time (Dovecot would probably cope, but UW-IMAP would get upset)

3) mbx-format mailboxes need to be converted to mailbox

There's also some info in the Wiki, I think, about it.

I was a bit paranoid and set up a duplicate delivery mechanism (easy in 
Exim) to deliver messages to a separate folder that I tried not to open 
with Dovecot, just in case it corrupted something (I used a script using 
UW-IMAP mailutil to prune messages older than 7 days from it). Having 
said that, I didn't see any corruption problems.

Hope this helps,
Chris

Daniel Watts wrote:
> 
> 
> Chris Wakelin wrote:
> 
>> Server: Sun Fire 480, 4xUltraSparcIII 900Mhz
>> Storage: Sun 1xT3 + 1xT4 arrays (Fibre Channel + RAID5)
>> OS: Solaris 8
>> RAM: 8GB
>> Number of Users: ~20,000 mostly IMAP
>> Authentication: Active Directory via PAM and pam_ldap
>> Dovecot version: 1.0 Beta 3
>> Email client software: various, mostly Outlook/Outlook Express and 
>> Prayer Webmail
>> Mailboxes sizes: ~375GB inboxes 800GB folders
>>
>> Migrated from UW-IMAP in September with spectacular improvement in 
>> performance!
>>
>> Chris
>>
> Hi Chris,
> 
> Just wondering - is it possible to install Dovecot on the same server as 
> UW IMAP but listening on a different port?
> Will the installation of Dovecot mess up any of UW's files/libraries?
> 
> I'd like to try running them side by side first so that I can get 
> Dovecot configured properly 'in-place' then switch off UW and have 
> Dovecot listen on 143.
> 
> I'm just nervous about installing Dovecot on the server and corrupting 
> UW somehow!
> 
> Daniel

-- 
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Christopher Wakelin,                           c.d.wakelin at reading.ac.uk
IT Services Centre, The University of Reading,  Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439
Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK              Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094