[Dovecot] Renaming user account / mailbox

[Timo Sirainen]

On 31.1.2012, at 14.07, Nikolaos Milas wrote:

> I am running dovecot-2.0.13-1_128.el5 x86_64 RPM on CentOS 5.7.
> 
> I would like to rename userx with email: userx at example.com to ux at example.com with a mailbox of ux (currently: userx)
> 
> Of course the idea is that new mail will continue to be delivered to the same mailbox, although it has been renamed.
> 
> How can I achieve it? Would it be enough (after changing the associated data in the associated LDAP entry) to simply rename the virtual user directory name, e.g. from /home/vmail/userx to /home/vmail/ux ?

Yes, you can just kill the user's existing connections, rename the directory and update the LDAP entry. If you do all of that quickly in a script, it's unlikely that you'll run into trouble. If a mail is being delivered at the same time, it could tempfail but will be retried again. (A more complex method would be using dsync, but probably not worth the trouble.)