[Dovecot] Staged migration from mbox to maildir

[Timo Sirainen]

On Mar 18, 2009, at 2:10 PM, Stewart Dean wrote:

> The problem comes with IMAP.  While dovecot can tell if a folder is  
> mbox or maildir, it has to be pointed to the right place (by  
> namespace definitions in the client, IIRC), and the default of  
> putting the inbox under ~/mail is one I'd like to embrace for  
> various reason...but given that that means moved inbox folders and  
> *that* means either making a global change (there goes staged  
> migration) OR changing the namespace definitions on each PC.  I can  
> get to the early few and change the namespaces definition, but there  
> doesn't appear to any equivalent (enlighten me, if I'm missing  
> something) to ~/.procmailrc for imap, so that I don't have to get on  
> the client machine.

By namespace definitions you probably mean the IMAP clients' "imap  
folder prefix" or whatever they happen to call them in different  
clients? You can create namespaces for backwards compatibility, you  
probably want similar namespaces to what is described here under UW- 
IMAP examples: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Namespaces

You could do that kind of a change already with mbox users to make  
sure everything works. Then have your users use one of the two  
mail_locations (by returning "mail" extra field from userdb):

  * mail_location = mbox:~/mail
  * mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir