[Dovecot] dsync is seriously broken when syncing maildir and mdbox

interfaSys sàrl interfasys at gmail.com
Tue Sep 28 22:08:17 EEST 2010



On 28/09/2010 19:54, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-09-28 at 03:08 +0100, interfaSys sàrl wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I thought mdbox was production ready, but it seems to me that (in 2.0.4)
>> it's quite broken.
>>
>> 1)  The documentation only running this to convert from maildir to mdbox:
>>
>> *dsync mirror maildir:~/Maildir*
>>
>> but based on my experience and on posts on the mailing list, it's not
>> enough.
>> A namespace has to be defined and it's not clear whether / or . should
>> be used as a separator.
>> I tried with a dot first and the INBOX folders were empty. It seemed to
>> work better with /
> 
> It doesn't really matter, just as long as it's something.
> 

OK, so maybe it was unrelated, but I think it should be added to the
Wiki that a namespace section has to be added since Maildir is fine
without it.


>> 2) After having defined a namespace, running dsync again makes it spit
>> tons of errors
>> Error: Can't rename mailbox INBOX_28c716242e53784cc9030100d3b51c5c to
>> INBOX: Target mailbox already exists
>> Error: Mailboxes don't have unique GUIDs:
>> 4536121fce3ca14cf8c40000d3b51c5c is shared by INBOX and
>> INBOX_4536121fce3ca14cf8c40c
> 
> What does "doveconf mail_location" say? It looks as if you're trying to
> convert from maildir:~/Maildir to maildir:~/Maildir, i.e. over itself. I
> thought about adding a check against that, but since it wasn't all that
> easy I thought maybe no one will actually run into that problem..
> 

This was set before using dsync:
mail_location = mdbox:~/mdbox

Maybe using a dot as the separator first created some problems since the
default for mdbox is /?
Some Maildir folders didn't have an INBOX folder, so maybe this also
generated issues?
On each run, I think that folders like INBOX_reeri3838 would be sent
back to Maildir which would send it back to mdbox, etc.

And the folder deletion problem was only experienced on Thunderbird 3.
It was straightforward to delete folders from the Webmail. Maybe it was
a subscription issue? Or maybe the webmail didn't have a cache for all
these accounts...

What I did in the end is to clean up everything I could see before
running dsync again and it seemed to work. If one folder was left (in
the bin per example), then there would be extra folders created again.

I hope this doesn't sound too confusing. I'm trying to provide as much
info as I can.



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