dovecot - Dec 2012 - Manually creating dovecot- files after isync/mbsync mirror

Hi everyone

I'm using isync 1.0.5 patched to do recursive folder listing and mirroring
mail from an external party's IMAP server to a local Maildir, which will be
accessed by Dovecot 2.0.9.

In order to prevent IMAP clients from re-downloading their mail, when
connecting to Dovecot, I'm busy writing a script to generate appropriate
dovecot-uidlist and dovecot-uidvalidity files, per Maildir.

isync stores the uid in the filename, so that's extractable, per message,
and the uidvalidity and current max uid are stored in a file .uidvalidity,
in each Maildir.

I've read the docs here: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir

Regarding the dovecot-uidlist header (first line) - I've tried to search
for and figure out what exactly is meant by the "mailbox global uid"
and
once I do, how to manually generate the 128 bit hex variation of it? Could
someone elaborate on this, please.

How would omitting the global uid field, beginning with G, affect remote
clients' syncing of mail? Is this field mandatory?

I also see that Dovecot's uidvalidity is of the form 4df8a4e2, whereas
isync uses an integer. I'd appreciate it if someone could elaborate on what
Dovecot uses and whether I can convert one to the other?

I'll post the full solution, once complete, and working.

Thanks.
Dale

On Wed, 2012-12-12 at 11:00 +0200, Dale Gallagher wrote:
> Hi everyone
> 
> I'm using isync 1.0.5 patched to do recursive folder listing and
mirroring
> mail from an external party's IMAP server to a local Maildir, which
will be
> accessed by Dovecot 2.0.9.
> 
> In order to prevent IMAP clients from re-downloading their mail, when
> connecting to Dovecot, I'm busy writing a script to generate
appropriate
> dovecot-uidlist and dovecot-uidvalidity files, per Maildir.
> 
> isync stores the uid in the filename, so that's extractable, per
message,
> and the uidvalidity and current max uid are stored in a file .uidvalidity,
> in each Maildir.
> 
> I've read the docs here: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir
> 
> Regarding the dovecot-uidlist header (first line) - I've tried to
search
> for and figure out what exactly is meant by the "mailbox global
uid" and
> once I do, how to manually generate the 128 bit hex variation of it? Could
> someone elaborate on this, please.
> 
> How would omitting the global uid field, beginning with G, affect remote
> clients' syncing of mail? Is this field mandatory?
Not necessary. Dovecot will add it later if needed.
> I also see that Dovecot's uidvalidity is of the form 4df8a4e2, whereas
> isync uses an integer. I'd appreciate it if someone could elaborate on
what
> Dovecot uses and whether I can convert one to the other?
dovecot-uidlist file isn't directly visible to IMAP client. The
UIDVALIDITY is converted between hex and decimals as necessary.