dovecot - Aug 2007 - UW-IMAP to Dovecot conversion - How to migrate the folders?

Hi all,

I've read so much information on this that I'm a little confused as to 
what to follow.  Here's what's going on:

We just migrated away from our AIX machines which were running Postfix 
and UW-IMAP.  We're now running Postfix with Dovecot.  I already 
converted everyone's mbox file to maildir, but now I'm having a little 
troubles with how to exactly populate their IMAP folders.  People are 
saying they cannot see their folders.  These 'folders' they are talking 
about can be found in their /home directory.

I have the following URLs I've been looking at:
http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/MailFormat
http://people.redhat.com/rkeech/maildir-migration.txt
http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Convert
http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2007-June/023757.html

What would be the suggested method to convert them?  So far I understand 
that I need to somehow populate the /home/USERNAME/Maildir/subscriptions 
file with the items located in /home/USERNAME/.mailboxlist and then I 
don't know what to do from there.  I don't know if I need to incorporate
a Dovecot plugin, or if there is a script I can run to do this for me.

Since this is a live server, I would prefer to test on a single account 
before I run a plugin that would effect all users globally.

Any help would be very appreciated - thanks in advance!

Patrick

Patrick - South Valley Internet spake the following on 8/20/2007 3:21
PM:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've read so much information on this that I'm a little confused as
to
> what to follow.  Here's what's going on:
> 
> We just migrated away from our AIX machines which were running Postfix
> and UW-IMAP.  We're now running Postfix with Dovecot.  I already
> converted everyone's mbox file to maildir, but now I'm having a
little
> troubles with how to exactly populate their IMAP folders.  People are
> saying they cannot see their folders.  These 'folders' they are
talking
> about can be found in their /home directory.
> 
> I have the following URLs I've been looking at:
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/MailFormat
> http://people.redhat.com/rkeech/maildir-migration.txt
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Convert
> http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2007-June/023757.html
> 
> What would be the suggested method to convert them?  So far I understand
> that I need to somehow populate the /home/USERNAME/Maildir/subscriptions
> file with the items located in /home/USERNAME/.mailboxlist and then I
> don't know what to do from there.  I don't know if I need to
incorporate
> a Dovecot plugin, or if there is a script I can run to do this for me.
> 
> Since this is a live server, I would prefer to test on a single account
> before I run a plugin that would effect all users globally.
> 
> Any help would be very appreciated - thanks in advance!
> 
> Patrick
> 
> 
> 
Have you tried to edit their subscriptions file?
Or log in with a client to one of the accounts and use its subscribe feature?
With the second method, you could get an idea of what the subscriptions layout
is and use a copy / sed script to fix each one.

-- 

MailScanner is like deodorant...
You hope everybody uses it, and
you notice quickly if they don't!!!!

On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 03:21:20PM -0700, Patrick - South Valley Internet
wrote:
> We just migrated away from our AIX machines which were running Postfix 
> and UW-IMAP.  We're now running Postfix with Dovecot.  I already 
> converted everyone's mbox file to maildir, but now I'm having a
little
> troubles with how to exactly populate their IMAP folders.  People are 
> saying they cannot see their folders.  These 'folders' they are
talking
> about can be found in their /home directory.
We just moved from HPUX to linux and there we had the problem, that with IMAP
and UW-IMAPd you had to specify a Folder Path in the client. With Dovecot and
Maildir you don't need this.

Check if your users have set this folder path. That solved a lot of problems
here.

Philipp

-- 
If you have problems in Windows: REBOOT
If you have problems in Linux:   BE ROOT

Hi Patrick,

On 20 Aug 2007, at 23:21, Patrick - South Valley Internet wrote:
> I've read so much information on this that I'm a little confused as
> to what to follow.  Here's what's going on:
>
> We just migrated away from our AIX machines which were running  
> Postfix and UW-IMAP.  We're now running Postfix with Dovecot.  I  
> already converted everyone's mbox file to maildir, but now I'm  
> having a little troubles with how to exactly populate their IMAP  
> folders.  People are saying they cannot see their folders.  These  
> 'folders' they are talking about can be found in their /home  
> directory.
I'm not sure this is relevant but...

Here we found that the standard installation of Outlook will by  
default only show folders that you have subscribed to.  This means if  
you simply convert the folders from Mbox to Maildir and put them into  
place Outlook users won't be shown them unless either:

   a) You also carefully convert the subscriptions data too (which  
the UW
      server keeps in a file called .mailboxlist), or

   b) You have everyone change their Outlook setting to show ALL  
folders instead
      only the subscribed ones.

Aside: the latter may be problematic in the longer run: I encountered  
Windows Mail (the Outlook Express replacement under Vista) for the  
first time yesterday, and this doesn't seem to have a "Show all  
folders" setting ... at least not one that I could find.  :-(

We decided it was too risky to convert people's mailboxes and  
subscriptions files: we were using UW's MBX format, which meant the  
conversion process would have been MBX --> Mbox --> Maildir :-(

Instead we're using the very-wonderful "imapsync" utility.  This
is a
Perl script that does everything using IMAP.  In particular it  
obtains the folder listing over IMAP, reads the messages over IMAP,  
writes folders/messages over IMAP and (most importantly) with the  
appropriate command line option can also copy over your subscriptions  
list.

Because all of this is done over IMAP you then don't have to worry  
about finding your old server's subscriptions file and mailbox  
structure/formats and converting them: it "just works" and everything
ends up correctly in Dovecot's folders.

The only downsides are that imapsync is CPU-intensive, and can take  
some (wall-clock) time.  But we thought it was worth doing that way  
for safety.  :-)

Cheers,
Mike B-)

-- 
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Tel:+44-1904-433811  FAX:+44-1904-433740

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