My sub-folder with Outlook work-around to date

Aki Tuomi aki.tuomi at dovecot.fi
Sun Oct 8 13:32:02 EEST 2017


You can give mail location and home directory from userdb or passdb.

For userdb, return mail=something:~/something and for home use home=/path/to/home

For passdb, you can return userdb_mail and userdb_home

Aki

> On October 8, 2017 at 1:14 PM Philon <bytesplit at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi David,
> 
> I somehow remember that there is a way to get the mail_location from per-user-settings. I had this once when migrating from maildir to mdbox.
> 
> You might want to use Google and the mailing list archives for the details but in summary it went like this:
> 
> - set Dovecot to grab the mail_location from user-settings (I think we used MySQL db field - or check docs for auto:)
> - have login script which converts maildir from setup A to B and update the user setting
> - kick the user once again to apply the setting (I’m not sure about this)
> 
> This then automates the conversion process to happen on next user login.
> 
> Be warned though that today with all the idle phones, probably many users will re-login after you restart the server. Perhaps the scripting could handle a timer which randomizes this a little.
> 
> 
> Philon
> 
> 
> > Am 07.10.2017 um 02:22 schrieb David.M.Clark <david at davrom.com>:
> > 
> > Hi All,
> > 
> > Thanks to MJ for the suggestion as my only hope, and I have tested this with Outlook 2016 and Thunderbird today - seamless creation of folders.
> > 
> > Now the mammoth task of converting customers with masses of mbox folders to MailDir format using the on-line perl script: mb2md-3.20.pl
> > 
> > Works nicely and will be what gets us out of trouble. My only sadness is that Outlook then has to be 're-subscribed' to the folders again.... which makes sense or maybe I didn't give it long enough - its IMAP folder syncs are extremely slow compared to Thunderbird which I also tested in parallel. Thunderbird didn't need any re-sync, it just found the new subscription setup and was ready to go. But in all fairness, Outlook is still really only an Exchange compatible product for the most part.
> > 
> > Would be great to run both mbox and MailDir at the same time so we can do the slow user-by-user process rather than having them all down at some point completely - might look at running Dovecot on a different port maybe with a different ".conf" but thinking this may not work anyway or cause issues.... back to my server tests to see :-)
> > 
> > I use additional ports to 143 for external IMAP restrictions anyway so might be able to do this method somehow.
> > 
> > Anyway, for those interested in where I got to in my testing so far...
> > 
> > 1. Download perl script "mb2md-3.20.pl" from:
> > 
> > http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md
> > 
> > 2. Changed Dovecot /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf mbox entry to MailDir:
> > 
> > #mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
> > mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir
> > 
> > 3. Restarted Dovecot
> > 
> > 4. su as user and in their home (/u/home/user on my setup):
> > 
> > /u/packages/mb2md-3.20.pl -m
> > 
> > then:
> > 
> > mv mail mail_old
> > 
> > then:
> > 
> > /u/packages/mb2md-3.20.pl -s mail_old -R
> > 
> > then:
> > 
> > Login with Outlook and subscribe to IMAP folders again.
> > 
> > Not a big fan of gazillions of little eml based text mail files in directories but hey, if it fixes our issues, maybe I need to stop wambulancing about it all and do as I am told :-)
> > 
> > Hope this helps - will keep this e-mail updated on findings if anything else comes to light.


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