dovecot - Oct 2005 - Two "pre-migration" questions

I have read the migration docs. They seem to relate to migrating from one
imap product to dovecot on the same server. I'm interested in migrating my
Maildir-formatted email from one server to another.

1. Can I tar my ~/mail directory on serverX.com, untar it on a different
physical serverY.com (initially with a different domain name), and still see
my mail when I access imap.serverY.com <http://imap.serverY.com>
(dovecot's
running on serverY.com .. but let me know if there are any tricks that I
need to make this work).

2. If I maintain large mailboxes and check my mail frequently, how does the
dovecot server load compare to something like apache or Samba?

I ask because I have a vanity domain that I mostly use for email and I want
to ensure that I can migrate my precious emails to a new service provider.
And the provider that I'm considering offers low-cost virtual dedicated
servers but meters usage (including RAM and CPU).

One of the reasons I have question #1 is that the server name seems to be
part of the email file names...

amead:/home/amead> ls mail/cur | head -2
2022292282.22297_0.vulcan.rootr.net:2,S
2022312282.3225_0.vulcan.rootr.net:2,S

(rootr.net <http://rootr.net> is my current provider, not my vanity
domain;
vulcan is the name of their mailserver) I don't know what effect this will
have, if any?

Thanks!

-Alan
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Alan Mead wrote:
> 1. Can I tar my ~/mail directory on serverX.com, untar it on a different
> physical serverY.com (initially with a different domain name), and still
see
> my mail when I access imap.serverY.com <http://imap.serverY.com>
(dovecot's
> running on serverY.com .. but let me know if there are any tricks that I
> need to make this work).
Sure can.  Dovecot doesn't care where you mail came from, or who it was sent
to.
  Just that it's where you told it to look for it.
> 2. If I maintain large mailboxes and check my mail frequently, how does the
> dovecot server load compare to something like apache or Samba?
Apples and oranges, in many ways.  I have all three running on the same server, 
and the IMAP loads are incidental.  But then, so are the Samba loads, most of 
the time.  This is just a 25person company, and the only thing on the server 
that will cause significant loads is Apache w/ mod_python (which isn't doing
much, yet, anyway).  (The server in this instance is a Sun V100 - 650MHz 
UltraSPARC-IIi, 1G RAM, 80GB ATA HDD).
> I ask because I have a vanity domain that I mostly use for email and I want
> to ensure that I can migrate my precious emails to a new service provider.
> And the provider that I'm considering offers low-cost virtual dedicated
> servers but meters usage (including RAM and CPU).
Well, I would recommend Dovecot over the other majors IMAPds in this case. 
Anecdotal evidence on this list suggests it will cause about 1/10 the load.
> One of the reasons I have question #1 is that the server name seems to be
> part of the email file names...
> 
> amead:/home/amead> ls mail/cur | head -2
> 2022292282.22297_0.vulcan.rootr.net:2,S
> 2022312282.3225_0.vulcan.rootr.net:2,S
This is part of the Maildir naming algorithm, and is used to generate
"unique"
message file names.

--
Curtis Maloney
cmaloney@cardgate.net