dovecot - Aug 2008 - Experience moving mailboxes from Dovecot 0.99.14 to Dovecot 1.07 => Improvement possible

Hi,

This small mail to share my observation about a recent move of mailboxes
between two servers and ask about explanation and/or improvement about UIDL
in dovecot.

SV1 : Dovecot 0.99.14 / Red Hat Fedore Core 4
SV2 : Dovecot 1.07 / CentOS 5.2
Mailboxes in /var/spool/mail on the twoo servers.

Test will be done with outlook express with option "leave message on
server"
checked.

Goal is simply to move users mailboxes from SV1 to SV2 without
re-downloading all messages.

Try 1:
- Stop dovecot on SV2
- Clear all dovecot indexes on SV2
- Rsync of my mailbox
 - Start dovecot on SV2
- Update pop setting in outlook and send/receive
Result : => starting to download 3000 mails...

After some debug, I discovered that UIDL where not of the same format => put
pop3_uidl_format = %v.%u in dovecot.conf of SV2.

 Try 2:
Same operations as Try1
 Result : => starting to download 3000 mails...

UIDL's where of the same format but values where not
corresponding... Teleting on SV1 and asking UIDL, last value is
xxxxxxxxxx.85878. On SV2, xxxxxxxxxx.85879 was the FIRST value of the list.
Conclusion for the moment, Dovecot has a problem with the detection of
existing UID of the moved mailbox.

Comparaison of first header found from the two mailboxes show ...
differences !

SV1 give the following :
(...)
X-UID: 70570
Content-Length: 1561
X-IMAPbase: xxxxxxxxxx 85845 $MDNSent
X-Keywords:
(...)

SV2 give the following (after first POP attempt) :
(...)
Content-Length: 1561
X-IMAPbase: xxxxxxxxxx 0000089204 $MDNSent
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 85846
(...)

Observation : X-UID: 85846 is not at the same place in the header.


 Try 3:
 - Stop dovecot on SV2
- Clear all dovecot indexes on SV2
- Rsync of my mailbox
- Edit mailbox and move X-UID header after the X-Keywords header
 - Start dovecot on SV2
- Update pop setting in outlook and send/receive

 Result : => OK.

Is that normal that dovecot is impacted by the position of the headers ?
Maybe some improvement possible ?

Maybe theyre is another method to make my migration ?

Any observation or comment is welcome...

-- 
Beno?t Desloges
Network Engineer

On 8/6/2008, Beno?t DESLOGES (benoit.desloges at gmail.com)
wrote:
> Goal is simply to move users mailboxes from SV1 to SV2 without
> re-downloading all messages.
If you're going to go through all of this trouble, you really should go 
ahead and update to latest version - now at 1.1.2...

rpms for centos available on atrpms.net

-- 

Best regards,

Charles

Quoting Charles Marcus <CMarcus at Media-Brokers.com>:
> rpms for centos available on atrpms.net
Sadly not for Centos 3.x, only for Centos 4/5... :(

Anyone know about Dovecot 1.1.x rpms for Centos/RHEL 3.x?

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Go Longhorns!

On Aug 6, 2008, at 9:28 AM, Beno?t DESLOGES wrote:
> Try 3:
> - Stop dovecot on SV2
> - Clear all dovecot indexes on SV2
> - Rsync of my mailbox
> - Edit mailbox and move X-UID header after the X-Keywords header
The important change was that X-UID: came after X-IMAPbase: header.
> - Start dovecot on SV2
> - Update pop setting in outlook and send/receive
>
> Result : => OK.
>
> Is that normal that dovecot is impacted by the position of the  
> headers ?
> Maybe some improvement possible ?
I did think about previously if it should work like this, but it  
seemed like a lot more extra work to support this kind of a situation  
properly and I thought it shouldn't happen normally anyway. I guess  
v0.99.x then wrote them in wrong order..

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Quoting Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net>:

Just to keep the list up-to-date in case any one is cruising the archives...
> On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 11:02:57AM -0500, Eric Rostetter wrote:
>> Quoting Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net>:
>>
>>>> Anyone know about Dovecot 1.1.x rpms for Centos/RHEL 3.x?
I still have not found any, but I was able to rebuild them (see below).
>>> You could try to rebuild from ATrpms' src.rpm, but to spare
some
>>> trouble this is what I had with 1.1.rc4 4 months ago:
>>
>> I tried this, and it failed due to incompatible tools versions
(autoconf,
>> libtool, etc).
After upgrading the tools to:

automake14-1.4p6
automake-1.9.2
automake15-1.5
autoconf-2.59
libtool-1.5.6
libtool-libs-1.5.6

And disabling a few features I don't use (MySQL, etc) I was able to get
the ATrpms Centos 4 dovecot 1.1.2 to build and run on CentOS 3.

See my next message for the nasty results of doing so...

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Go Longhorns!