[Dovecot] Questions still about a uw-imap -> dovecot conversion

[Steve Campbell]

On 2/20/2012 7:25 PM, Joseph Tam wrote:
>
> Steve Campbell wrote:
>
>> The more I read about all of this, the more I'm thinking about moving 
>> to maildir format. My switchover this weekend is full of holes due to 
>> the way user's imap folders were laid out. Some had folders in their 
>> home directory and others might have folders in their /home/mail 
>> directory.
>
> I had the same problem, and handled it more or less the same way as
> the later poster (Jim Lawson <jtl+dovecot at uvm.edu>) handled his site.
> I retained use of mbox format as well.
>
> I planned the migration like this
>
>     - scan user home directories for mailboxes (especially "Trash",
>     "Drafts", "Sent", etc.) looking for "From " as the first 5 bytes.
>
>     This was piped into a script that Email'd users about the changes
>     that was going to happen, what they would expect to see, and a
>     FAQ on how to set up a mail client correctly.

Here, I'm not sure what should be done. The users with the secondary 
folders that are not in ~/mail can't seem to get the client configured.
>
>     - during the cutover,
>
>         - mailboxes left on the home directory were moved to
>         ~/mail, or renamed (e.g. "Sent" -> "00Sent" to avoid
>         name collision for users that had a mixture of correct
>         and blank prefixes.
>
I've tried this and modified the .mailboxlist, but I'm thinking Dovecot 
is ignoring this and I'm not sure what it's looking at to determine the 
imap folders.
>         (I think I deleted "Trash", "Junk", etc. anyways).
>
>         - Namespace aliasing was used so that prefixes "", "mail",
>         "~/mail", and whatever darn fool settings my users used,
>         would map to the same directory.
>
>         - .subscription files were moved into the mail folder
>         (don't have to edit prefixes since the aliasing
>         will take care of that).

And when would these .subscription files be created? The first time the 
folders would be accessed, or when? This seems to be part of my fix that 
I'm getting lost on.
>
>         - depending on what POP3 client you used (I used
>         qpopper), you may need to configure
>
>             pop3_reuse_xuidl = yes
>
>         to avoid a massive re-downloading from POP3 clients
>         after cutover.
>
>         - the mail clients I control centrally (e.g. webmail,
>         public server mail clients, etc). shouldn't need updating
>         since they ought to have been set up properly in the first
>         place.
>
>     - after cutover, a second notification was sent for users that
>     didn't move their mailboxes the first time around, and was it
>     done for them during migration.
>
> And of course, test like crazy and watch the logs like a hawk.
>
> Other gotcha's:
>
>     - your setup is fairly close to mine, so you may also run into
>     the problem of user having mailboxes with group ownership that
>     users are not part of (for example, group "mail" for INBOX set
>     by your LDA or personal mailboxes with groups the user is no
>     longer a member of) *and* with group permission not mode=0.

Sendmail sort of requires the "mail" group, does it not? I'll take a 
look and see if all users are part of this or not. A crazy solution 
would be in order here?
>
>     You'll have to treat these (set mode=0, or change the group to
>     something the user is part of), or the dovecot index creation
>     will fail and they won't be able to access their mailboxes.
>
> I think my migration went pretty smoothly.  Less than a handful of 
> wazzup'
> Email problem reports.

Except for those users with the different folder locations, it seems 
that all is going pretty well. Maybe they're just not notifying me yet, 
though.
>
> Joseph Tam <jtam.home at gmail.com>
>
>
Thanks
steve