dovecot - Aug 2007 - Migration woes from tpop mbox to dovecot maildir

I was hoping some one might be able to offer me some advice on a little 
problem I have. I am looking to A. move from mbox to maildir B. looking 
to move from tpop to dovecot to bring both pop and imap under the same 
program. anyways the problem I am having is this tpop3d mbox uses  MD5 
sum of the mailbox headers in hex which is option %m in the uidl section 
but the problem is when dovecot convert plugin runs and makes in a 
maildir it fails to find the md5 of this because it is only used for 
mboxs. if I change this from %m to %Mf it downloads every message on the 
clients computer which is not desirable. I was thinking only options i 
have is to allow it to download all them mail and or write a script to 
convert it to maildir or another pop servers uidl. but i dont know much 
about how other pop servers generate there headers. so I was hoping 
maybe some one has done something similar to this or could offer some 
input. thanks

-Chris

 



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Chris Richardson wrote:
> I was hoping some one might be able to offer me some advice on a 
> little problem I have. I am looking to A. move from mbox to maildir B. 
> looking to move from tpop to dovecot to bring both pop and imap under 
> the same program. anyways the problem I am having is this tpop3d mbox 
> uses  MD5 sum of the mailbox headers in hex which is option %m in the 
> uidl section but the problem is when dovecot convert plugin runs and 
> makes in a maildir it fails to find the md5 of this because it is only 
> used for mboxs. if I change this from %m to %Mf it downloads every 
> message on the clients computer which is not desirable. I was thinking 
> only options i have is to allow it to download all them mail and or 
> write a script to convert it to maildir or another pop servers uidl. 
> but i dont know much about how other pop servers generate there 
> headers. so I was hoping maybe some one has done something similar to 
> this or could offer some input. thanks
>
> -Chris
>
I have the very same problem. The only difference is that I have already 
migrated to dovecot and using mbox for both pop3 and imap.
Am still looking for the good solution to migrate to Maildir without 
making my clients re-download all their mail (they won't get dups with 
imap,
but downloading gigabytes of mail isn't good idea either.
 Timo suggested writing a script that would create dovecot-uidlist files 
for every mailbox with old-style (%m in your case) UIDs during migration 
and that makes
perfect sense to me. However I'm really bad with programming and cat 
rely on my own script for such an important task.

P.S. not sure how dovecot handles pop3 UID's. In my case I need 
preserving UIDs in imap-to-imap (mbox-to-Maildir) migration.

FiL