[Dovecot] Question about mail storage

[Timo Sirainen]

On Mon, 2006-04-17 at 15:58 -0400, Stewart Dean wrote:
> If I understand correctly, the typical default Dovecot/maildir format
> installation will have both the INBOX and folders (prefixed with a
> period), so they take the format: .<foldername>) under ~/Maildir.
> Right?  I am planning to do a gradual phaseover of one chunk of ids at a
> time........

Perhaps easiest would be to first use Dovecot with mbox, and move to
maildir only after that?

> Some questions:
> 1) In the UW IMap docs, formats.txt discusses a bunch of different
> mailbox formats.  I am unclear as to whether I currently have what
> Crispin describes at .unix format or .mbx format.

You most likely have unix format, which means the same as mbox.

> How do I tell them apart? Alternately, how do I tell if what I now have
> (some sort of one big single-file INBOX) is mbox?  Or is what he's
> referring to as unix just mbox

Look at the beginning of the file. If it begins with "From ", it's mbox.

> 2) How to change Where Things End Up
> a) The users' ~/.procmailrc pretty much consists of: MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
> Am I correct in assuming that this should be changed to:
> MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/

Yep.

> b) Mail appears to end up in /var/spool/mail/<username> because that's
> the procmail default (ORGMAIL).
> To redirect individual users (because this will be a gradual
> changeover), am I correct in assuming that putting:
> DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/
> in ~/.procmailrc will redirect incoming mail?

Probably. :)

> 3) I see that, in the default configuration, /everything/ will now be
> under ~/Maildir and thus in the home directories.  Is there a reason to
> get away from a separate INBOX directory (we use /var/spool/mail)?  I'd
> have to rebuild the homedir filesystems to accommodate the INBOX
> demands.  This isn't all that big a deal, I'd like to understand the
> rationale..or should I just bow to the inevitable?

You can keep the INBOX in a separate directory with maildir too, if you
really want to, like Jim already said.

> 4) Pardon my stupidity, but how is the Dovecot INBOX under maildir++
> organized?
> a) Is it a separate directory under ~/Maildir (say ~/Maildir/INBOX or
> some such) that has a separate file for each message or
> b) are the INBOX messages just mixed in with the folders under
> ~/Maildir.  If so, how are they differentated?

Maildir consists of tmp, new and cur directories. These directories for
INBOX exist directly under ~/Maildir. The other folders then exist as
~/Maildir.folder.name, and the tmp/new/cur directories under them.
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