dovecot - Apr 2012 - dovecot and unison

I am successfully using dovecot purely as a personal local mail store on 
my desktop. (There is only one account, and it's only ever accessed by 
local mail clients on the machine. The point is to have a common store I 
can use with any client; plus, I prefer dovecot's Mailbox storage to 
Thunderbird's mboxes.)

Now I'd like if possible, to replicate this setup on my laptop and keep 
both in sync with unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/), 
which I am already using to sync much of my home dir about once a day.

I found at least one positive message regarding this topic 
(http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2010-April/048092.html), but I feel I 
could use some more advice.

Namely, which of the ancillary files should I be syncing (or perhaps 
deleting before sync)? In addition to the mails themselves I'm seeing:

-rw-------   1 fz  501     13 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot-keywords
-rw-------   1 fz  501   2483 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot-uidlist
-rw-------   1 fz  501   1040 Mar 29 14:50 dovecot.index
-rw-------   1 fz  501  44032 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot.index.cache
-rw-------   1 fz  501   9772 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot.index.log

and at the top level (in .local/var/Maildir/):

-rw-------   1 fz  501      8 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot-uidvalidity
-r--r--r--   1 fz  501      0 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot-uidvalidity.4efb323d
-rw-------   1 fz  501   3288 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot.mailbox.log
-rw-------   1 fz  501   4104 Mar 28 10:53 dovecot.mailbox.log.2
-rw-------   1 fz  501   5114 Apr  1 17:10 subscriptions

In my naive trials I ended up at least once in a situation where 
Thunderbird would not see some subfolders (even though they were there). 
That's since fixed but I guess my question is, what's the safe 
recommended way to not have this happen?

Thanks,
FZiegler

Hi --

[Sorry for my private response, instead of public one]

On 03.04.2012, at 01:02, FZiegler wrote:
> Now I'd like if possible, to replicate this setup on my laptop and keep
> both in sync with unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/),
> which I am already using to sync much of my home dir about once a day.
> 
> I found at least one positive message regarding this topic
> (http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2010-April/048092.html), but I feel I
> could use some more advice.
I used to sync my two server's maildirs for some years, but I moved to
dsync mirroring some months ago, and now I'm into using replicator/dsync
(see archive of March 2012).

Unsion mirroring is working in general, but sometimes you might realize
some duplicates being produced. Not bad, but it happens. I did realize
the same with using dsync mirror instead. It's much better with the new
replicator/dsync mirroring scheme, but it's not perfect, yet. (Again, see
ML archives of the last weeks). 
> Namely, which of the ancillary files should I be syncing (or perhaps
> deleting before sync)? In addition to the mails themselves I'm seeing:
> 
> -rw-------   1 fz  501     13 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot-keywords
> -rw-------   1 fz  501   2483 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot-uidlist
> -rw-------   1 fz  501   1040 Mar 29 14:50 dovecot.index
> -rw-------   1 fz  501  44032 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot.index.cache
> -rw-------   1 fz  501   9772 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot.index.log
> 
> and at the top level (in .local/var/Maildir/):
> 
> -rw-------   1 fz  501      8 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot-uidvalidity
> -r--r--r--   1 fz  501      0 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot-uidvalidity.4efb323d
> -rw-------   1 fz  501   3288 Apr  1 17:10 dovecot.mailbox.log
> -rw-------   1 fz  501   4104 Mar 28 10:53 dovecot.mailbox.log.2
I used ...

	ignore = Name dovecot*
	ignore = Regex .*/tmp$
	ignore = Regex .*/\.Drafts$

? to ignore all of them. When runnig mirroring for the very first time, I
started with one empty maildir at one server, IIRC. You better check that
with a test maildir beforehand.
> -rw-------   1 fz  501   5114 Apr  1 17:10 subscriptions
That became mirrored.

Regards,
Michael

At Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:02:17 -0400,
FZiegler wrote:
> 
> I am successfully using dovecot purely as a personal local mail store on 
> my desktop. (There is only one account, and it's only ever accessed by 
> local mail clients on the machine. The point is to have a common store I 
> can use with any client; plus, I prefer dovecot's Mailbox storage to 
> Thunderbird's mboxes.)
> 
> Now I'd like if possible, to replicate this setup on my laptop and keep
> both in sync with unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/), 
> which I am already using to sync much of my home dir about once a day.
> 
> I found at least one positive message regarding this topic 
> (http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2010-April/048092.html), but I feel I 
> could use some more advice.
I have a similar setup, but I use offlineimap instead of unison:

	http://offlineimap.org/

It seems to work pretty well.  That's not to say that unison wouldn't
work as well also.  However, offlineimap has the advantage that it
doesn't restrict you to a star topology.  You can, for instance, since
to your laptop at work and from your laptop at home.

Note that offlineimap is slow if you don't use imap at both ends.
Therefore, I use it on the local end.  A simplified excerpt of my
.offlineimaprc looks like this:

=======
[general]
accounts = DefaultAccount

[Account DefaultAccount]
localrepository = MyLocal
remoterepository = MyRemote

[Repository MyRemote]
type = IMAP
preauthtunnel = ssh -qax -oBatchMode=yes -oServerAliveInterval=60 MY-MAIL-SERVER
'exec env CONFIG_FILE=/PATH/TO/PRIVATE/dovecot.conf
/usr/lib/dovecot/imap'

[Repository MyLocal]
type = IMAP
preauthtunnel = CONFIG_FILE=$HOME/etc/dovecot.conf /usr/lib/dovecot/imap

=======
Unfortunately, in dovecot 2.1, the full text search no longer seems to
work in pre-auth mode, but I don't think that has anything to do with
offlineimap.  I think maybe dovecot is deprecating pre-auth mode or
requires a more complicated setup.

Michael Grimm wrote:
>> Namely, which of the ancillary files should I be syncing (or perhaps
>> deleting before sync)?
> I used ...
> 
> 	ignore = Name dovecot*
> 	ignore = Regex .*/tmp$
> 	ignore = Regex .*/\.Drafts$
> 
> ? to ignore all of them.
Thanks Michael for this (and thanks also mazieres at stanford for your 
reply). I am now merrily ignoring these files too, and synced 400 MB of 
mail without seeing the disappearing subfolder issue again.

Francois Z.