Dovecot and data migration

[Alain BERNARD]

Hi,

Our legacy data store retains a single copy of a message regardless of the
number of mailboxes in which that message resides. It does this by creating
hard links to that message in the mailboxes containing that message.
Thus, when we perform data migration to the server target (Dovecot), the
copies of the same message are copied over with the migration process
(imapsync). We use the storage format maildir.
With a small message store, this means that a lot of messages are
duplicated unnecessarily. How to reduce message store size due to duplicate
storage of identical messages ?

Does a relinking function exist and can be run in real-time mode ? how can
we configure Dovecot to deduplicate for all users using a hash to determine
whether the file could be already exist ?

Thanks in advance.

Memo