[Dovecot] Manually creating dovecot- files after isync/mbsync mirror

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2012-12-12 at 11:00 +0200, Dale Gallagher wrote:
> Hi everyone
> 
> I'm using isync 1.0.5 patched to do recursive folder listing and mirroring
> mail from an external party's IMAP server to a local Maildir, which will be
> accessed by Dovecot 2.0.9.
> 
> In order to prevent IMAP clients from re-downloading their mail, when
> connecting to Dovecot, I'm busy writing a script to generate appropriate
> dovecot-uidlist and dovecot-uidvalidity files, per Maildir.
> 
> isync stores the uid in the filename, so that's extractable, per message,
> and the uidvalidity and current max uid are stored in a file .uidvalidity,
> in each Maildir.
> 
> I've read the docs here: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir
> 
> Regarding the dovecot-uidlist header (first line) - I've tried to search
> for and figure out what exactly is meant by the "mailbox global uid" and
> once I do, how to manually generate the 128 bit hex variation of it? Could
> someone elaborate on this, please.
> 
> How would omitting the global uid field, beginning with G, affect remote
> clients' syncing of mail? Is this field mandatory?

Not necessary. Dovecot will add it later if needed.

> I also see that Dovecot's uidvalidity is of the form 4df8a4e2, whereas
> isync uses an integer. I'd appreciate it if someone could elaborate on what
> Dovecot uses and whether I can convert one to the other?

dovecot-uidlist file isn't directly visible to IMAP client. The
UIDVALIDITY is converted between hex and decimals as necessary.