[Dovecot] Smooth mailbox to maildir migration

[Scott Silva]

on 2-10-2009 7:49 AM Luciano Mannucci spake the following:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have a postfix+procmail+dovecot installation, now running basicaly
> on pop3 hence mailbox format, with few thousand users and less than
> twenty gigabytes mail.
> I need to move all of them to maildir, to take advantage of IMAP
> subfolders that do not work with mbox format (so I'm told :).
> Of course I cannot safely stop the service for more than a bunch of
> seconds...
> 
You can have subfolders with mbox, but you can not have folders that contain
both messages and sub-folders. They either have messages or sub-folders.

> What I'm about to do:
> 
> create a second dovecot instance to cope with imap client configured
> for maildir (and possibly pop3 on another port for those using both),
> which means a dovecot launched with -c /path/to/alternate.conf and a
> new /etc/init.d/dovecot2-theRevenge having the proper -i option given
> to startproc in order to make it ignore the other instance.
> 
I think you can do this with namespaces, without running two dovecot daemons.

> for each user:
> 
> convert the mailbox with some sort of mb2mb (which is the better one?)
I am also working on this, but I don't have as many users.

> 
> create a .procmailrc with a proper DEFAULT= bearing the magic trailing
> slash indicating maildir to procmail for each converted user.
You will have to do this unless you can convert all users at once.
> 
> And I'm done...
> 
> Have I forgotten something?
> Is there a better way?
> Any one else tried such a thing?
> 
> Cheers to all,
> 
> luciano.


-- 
MailScanner is like deodorant...
You hope everybody uses it, and
you notice quickly if they don't!!!!

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