dovecot - Dec 2004 - Need subfolders - convert to Maildir & how?

I just installed Dovecot and it is working great.

But I need subfolders. Does this mean I need to convert to Maildir 
format? I found several tools to do the conversion, but is there 
anything that needs to be changed in Dovecot to make the switch?

Any advice appreciated.

Thank you,
Michael Hipp
Heber Springs, AR, USA

Hi Michael

On 21/12/04, Michael Hipp (Michael at Hipp.com) wrote:
> I just installed Dovecot and it is working great.
> 
> But I need subfolders. Does this mean I need to convert to Maildir 
> format? I found several tools to do the conversion, but is there 
> anything that needs to be changed in Dovecot to make the switch?
Have you had a look at the conf file?

In the current Debian testing version of Dovecot you will see:

# Default MAIL environment to use when it's not set. By leaving this
# empty
# dovecot tries to do some automatic detection as described in
# /usr/share/doc/dovecot-common/mail-storages.txt. There's a few special 
# variables you can use:
#
#   %u - username
#   %n - user part in user at domain, same as %u if there's no domain
#   %d - domain part in user at domain, empty if user there's no domain
#   %h - home directory
#
# You can also limit a width of string by giving the number of max.
# characters
# after the '%' character. For example %1u gives the first character of
# username. Some examples:
#
#   default_mail_env = maildir:/var/mail/%1u/%u/Maildir
#   default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
#   default_mail_env = mbox:/var/mail/%d/%n/:INDEX=/var/indexes/%d/%n

Read "Detecting what to use" in the mail-storages document. Dovecot
checks to see if Maildir format is used and then falls back on mbox
storage.

Have you checked your MTA (exim/postfix...) is delivering into maildir
format?

Rory
-- 
Rory Campbell-Lange 
<rory at campbell-lange.net>
<www.campbell-lange.net>

Michael Hipp wrote:
> I just installed Dovecot and it is working great.
> 
> But I need subfolders. Does this mean I need to convert to Maildir 
> format? I found several tools to do the conversion, but is there 
> anything that needs to be changed in Dovecot to make the switch?
> 
Technically, no, you do not need to change to Maildir.  The limitation mbox 
places on folders is that they may only contain mailboxes and other folders, 
but NOT messages.  Only mailboxes may contain messages.

That being said, I have seen far fewer bugs and struggles on this list from 
people using Maildir than mbox. :)

In my hunting I found various tools which claimed to be able to convert mbox 
to Maildir, but I was mostly trying to migrate people out of a Windows based 
"client saves all" setup... so in the end, it was, in fact, OE which
was out
greatest tool to migrating messages to IMAP/Maildir, and thus doing away with 
IE. (Thunderbird came a close second.)

A quick google on "mb2md" will likely turn up useful results.
> Thank you,
> Michael Hipp
--
Curtis Maloney