dovecot - Feb 2005 - Migrating from mbox to maildir: Message ordering?

Hi, all.

I have been playing with the notion of migrating some of my folders to 
maildir because it's a lot easier to manage that way from a reader 
standpoint.  The big question I have is how do I maintain message 
ordering in each folder?

When I use a mail program to do the migration from mbox to maildir, 
selecting "order received ascending", it works nicely, but one very 
small problem:  When I go to look at the newly-populated folder, 
everything is in reverse order.  I've tried it with T'bird and I've 
tried it with Pine.  Both yield the same results.  I'm thinking the 
issue might be with Dovecot.  Or is it a peculiarity with maildir?  Or 
am I better off using other means to convert a mbox folder to maildir?

I like maintaining the message delivery order so especially items like 
mailng list threads can (normally) flow right.  I don't always trust the 
message's date field because it CAN be faked (and sometimes is by the 
sender, whether accidental or intentional).

And while we're on the subject, since maildir's a file-per-message 
mailstore, what happens to ordering when you delete a message and a new 
message arrives?

However, otherwise, everything else is working beautifully.  I haven't 
gone into bashing the living hell out of it to make sure it REALLY works

The testing was done with Dovecot 1.0test62, Thunderbird 1.0, and Pine 
4.62.  Both mbox and maildir folderstores are on the same machine and 
Dovecot's configured to use both with a maildir in the user's directory,
oddly enough, called "maildir", for their maildir store.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can render.

--Ian.

Ian R. Justman wrote:
> When I use a mail program to do the migration from mbox to maildir, 
> selecting "order received ascending", it works nicely, but one
very
> small problem:  When I go to look at the newly-populated folder, 
> everything is in reverse order.  I've tried it with T'bird and
I've
> tried it with Pine.  Both yield the same results.  I'm thinking the 
> issue might be with Dovecot.  Or is it a peculiarity with maildir?  Or 
> am I better off using other means to convert a mbox folder to maildir?
Message ordering works fine here (with maildir's) so perhaps it is an issue
of
nomenclature.  I use "date ascending" which probably more accurately
sorts the
messages in terms of when the sender sent the message.  The newest messages show
up at the bottom of the list.  Is that not what you see?

Or rather, perhaps using the mail program to do the migration is interfering 
with the order.  Are you saying you are sending the messages to yourself?  This 
would create a new RECEIVED: line which would be in the order the messages were 
transferred, not(!) the order the messages were originally received.

Check out OfflineIMAP:

	http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/offlineimap

for transferring messages from one account to another...

HTH

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4720 Boston Way
Lanham, MD 20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5747

I wrote:
> 
> Hi, all.
> 
> I have been playing with the notion of migrating some of my folders to 
> maildir because it's a lot easier to manage that way from a reader 
> standpoint.  The big question I have is how do I maintain message 
> ordering in each folder?
[...]

Thanks to all who sent your suggestions.  I found a solution that worked
exactly for what I wanted and one that might come in handy in the future.

I just need to muck about a bit more with the code to make sure that any
decision to migrate to a hybrid mbox/maildir setup with a test series
release isn't one in vain.  :)

--Ian.