dovecot - Apr 2006 - preserving pop3 mail uids

Is there some way that message uids can be preserved when converting uw-pop3
mbox mail to dovecot maildir format?
We've tried perfect_maildir, mb2md and the convert-tool that comes with
dovecot but so far have been unable to preserve
the message uids, which for example go from 44333a8500000003 before the
conversion to 4434621500000003 afterwards.
The quantity of mailboxes involved means forcing users to re-pop old emails left
on the server isn't an option. Any help appreciated.

On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 10:40:58AM +1000, adcx at server101.com wrote:
> Is there some way that message uids can be preserved when converting
uw-pop3 mbox mail to dovecot maildir format?
> We've tried perfect_maildir, mb2md and the convert-tool that comes with
dovecot but so far have been unable to preserve
> the message uids, which for example go from 44333a8500000003 before the
conversion to 4434621500000003 afterwards.
> The quantity of mailboxes involved means forcing users to re-pop old emails
left on the server isn't an option. Any help appreciated.
what clients directly use the UIDs? I thought ~all client used the
X-UIDL header for this purpose, and there is a dovecot feature
`pop3_reuse_xuidl' which will read X-UIDL headers from message bodies
and store them in the indexes.

grant.

On Thu, 2006-04-06 at 10:40 +1000, adcx at server101.com
wrote:
> Is there some way that message uids can be preserved when converting
uw-pop3 mbox mail to dovecot maildir format?
> We've tried perfect_maildir, mb2md and the convert-tool that comes with
dovecot but so far have been unable to preserve
> the message uids, which for example go from 44333a8500000003 before the
conversion to 4434621500000003 afterwards.
> The quantity of mailboxes involved means forcing users to re-pop old emails
left on the server isn't an option. Any help appreciated.
If you can preserve the messages' UID values (ie. X-UID header needs to
be moved to correct entry in dovecot-uidlist file), then it's easy.
Besides UID you'll have to preserve UIDVALIDITY (in X-IMAPbase or X-IMAP
header, move to first line in dovecot-uidlist).

After this, you can use pop3_uidl_format = %08Xv%08Xu

Unfortunately I don't know of any conversion tool that preserves the
UIDs. I thought for a while about doing it in convert-tool, but it'd
require pretty large changes to Dovecot.

And as Grant said, another way would be X-UIDL headers, but you'd need
to also create them properly to the mbox files (so the mails really have
"X-UIDL: 44333a8500000003" header), so that they get moved into the
maildir files as well.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL:
<http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20060409/c6774e1f/attachment.bin>