dovecot - Jan 2012 - Renaming user account / mailbox

Hello,

I am running dovecot-2.0.13-1_128.el5 x86_64 RPM on CentOS 5.7.

All accounts are virtual, hosted on LDAP Server. We are using Maildir 
mailboxes.

The question: What is the process to rename an existing account/mailbox?

I would like to rename userx with email: userx at example.com to 
ux at example.com with a mailbox of ux (currently: userx)

Of course the idea is that new mail will continue to be delivered to the 
same mailbox, although it has been renamed.

How can I achieve it? Would it be enough (after changing the associated 
data in the associated LDAP entry) to simply rename the virtual user 
directory name, e.g. from /home/vmail/userx to /home/vmail/ux ?

Thanks in advance,
Nick

On 31.1.2012, at 14.07, Nikolaos Milas wrote:
> I am running dovecot-2.0.13-1_128.el5 x86_64 RPM on CentOS 5.7.
> 
> I would like to rename userx with email: userx at example.com to ux at
example.com with a mailbox of ux (currently: userx)
> 
> Of course the idea is that new mail will continue to be delivered to the
same mailbox, although it has been renamed.
> 
> How can I achieve it? Would it be enough (after changing the associated
data in the associated LDAP entry) to simply rename the virtual user directory
name, e.g. from /home/vmail/userx to /home/vmail/ux ?
Yes, you can just kill the user's existing connections, rename the directory
and update the LDAP entry. If you do all of that quickly in a script, it's
unlikely that you'll run into trouble. If a mail is being delivered at the
same time, it could tempfail but will be retried again. (A more complex method
would be using dsync, but probably not worth the trouble.)