dovecot - Aug 2009 - More Migration Questions

Hello,

I was on here a month or two ago asking lots of questions about
migrating from uw-imapd/qpopper/mbox to dovecot/maildir. I am now at the
stage where i'm trying to convert all my emails, but i have a few
questions...

Where should i convert my mbox mailboxes into?
"/home/username/Maildir/"
or "/somewhere/maildirs/"?

Does it actually matter? Is there a standard location that they *should* go?

I've tried converting them into "/somewhere/maildirs/username/",
but
then i found a dovecot page that says they are usually stored in
"/home/username/Maildir" so now i don't know where to put them!

Also, having converted the mbox files into maildir files, i do seem to
have one email per file, as intended, but the files have names like
"1250253965.000586.mbox,S=8167,W=8427:2,S". Should they have the word
"mbox" in their filename if they are maildir files?

Finally, it appears that our existing IMAP users (all mbox) have
mailboxes stored simply in their home directory, not necessarily inside
the "~/mail/" directory - is this going to be a problem?

The command i'm using to convert is this one:

./migrateuser.sh username /home/username /vol2/maildirs/username

This script (and the latest mb2md.py that goes with it, to preserve msg
IDs) were obtained from here: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/MailFormat

The stage i'm at with the server overall is that uw-imapd and qpopper
have been completely removed, exim is currently setup to deliver via
it's own method into the mbox files in /var/spool/mail but the exim
service is stopped because i'm migrating, and dovecot 1.1 is installed
but stopped, and has had no configuration done to it yet whatsoever.

So... any advice?

Thanks in advance!

Richard.

-- 
Richard Hobbs (IT Specialist)
Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. - Cambridge Research Laboratory
Email: richard.hobbs at crl.toshiba.co.uk
Web: http://www.toshiba-europe.com/research/
Tel: +44 1223 436999        Mobile: +44 7811 803377
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3306 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL:
<http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20090814/7ac545a3/attachment-0002.bin>

On Aug 14, 2009, at 8:57 AM, Richard Hobbs wrote:
> Where should i convert my mbox mailboxes into? "/home/username/ 
> Maildir/"
> or "/somewhere/maildirs/"?
>
> Does it actually matter? Is there a standard location that they  
> *should* go?
It doesn't matter. Maildir/ is a bit more standard, but Dovecot  
doesn't care.
> Also, having converted the mbox files into maildir files, i do seem to
> have one email per file, as intended, but the files have names like
> "1250253965.000586.mbox,S=8167,W=8427:2,S". Should they have the
word
> "mbox" in their filename if they are maildir files?
The file names don't matter, as long as they're unique. The S= and W=  
parts are about optimizing looking up file sizes.
> Finally, it appears that our existing IMAP users (all mbox) have
> mailboxes stored simply in their home directory, not necessarily  
> inside
> the "~/mail/" directory - is this going to be a problem?
That's better actually, you don't then have to add those ~/mail/  
compabilitity namespaces.
> The command i'm using to convert is this one:
>
> ./migrateuser.sh username /home/username /vol2/maildirs/username
I'd have separate "home" and maildir directories. For example:

home = /vol2/maildirs/username
mail_location = maildir: ~/Maildir

http://wiki.dovecot.org/VirtualUsers#Home_directories