[Novalug] swapping mailbox to maildir format?

Jason Kohles jkohles@palantir.com
Tue Feb 4 11:37:02 EST 2014


Dovecot has several options for converting formats:

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Migration/MailFormat


-- 
Jason Kohles
Palantir Technologies  | IT Site Engineer
jkohles@palantir.com   | 703-957-5784





On 2/4/14, 11:32 AM, "John Franklin" <franklin@elfie.org> wrote:

>If you are already using postfix and dovecot, they also support Maildir.
>And ISTR one of them has a conversion tool -- or there is a perl script
>that's out there easily googled.
>
>It's been a while since I've done it.  I have an old mbox server I want
>to convert myself, but it takes hours to do and test and feel confident
>it's going to work.
>
>jf
>
>On Feb 4, 2014, at 11:00 AM, Richard Rognlie <rrognlie@gamerz.net> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 01:06:31PM +1300, Mark Smith wrote:
>>> was thinking (again) of switching from mailbox to maildir format.
>>> i might find the time soon. :-)  has anyone done this recently and what
>>> were the gotchya's for it?
>> 
>> you need to do this in two lock steps...
>> 
>> update your local mailer to deliver to maildir format
>> update your pop/imap servers to something that groks the maildir format
>> 
>> You'll also need to convert your existing mailbox files into a maildir
>> heirarchy, but that can happen either before of after you "go live"
>> 
>> The last time I looked at open source for this, I liked cyrus, a lot.
>> It provided both a replacement local delivery agent and a pop/imap
>>server.
>> But my knowledge is getting rather dated, I've not investigated this is
>> probably 12 years...
>> 
>> The advantages of maildir vs mailbox are numerous.  Especially if you
>> tend to have a large inbox.
>> 
>> mail delivery is fairly simple in both cases
>>        mailbox
>>                lock mail
>>                append to mail file
>>                unlock
>>        maildir
>>                lock maildir
>>                increment a msg counter (and store somewhere)
>>                unlock maildir
>>                write msg to the msg file
>> 
>> It's on mail retrieval that maildir really kicks butt
>> with mailbox format, if you delete *some* messages after retrieval,
>> but not all... then entire mailbox has to be rewritten.  Sure, there
>>are 
>> some ways to optimize how much of the file you rewrite, but...  from the
>> first msg that is deleted until the end of file... it's all new.
>> 
>> If you delete all msgs, you can just nuke the mailbox.  And if you keep
>> all msgs (and don't update any flags) you can just leave the mailbox
>>file
>> in place.
>> 
>> for maildir format, you are tweaking individual files.  Mass update is
>>fast.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> /  \__  | Richard Rognlie / Scality CSE / Gamerz.NET Lackey
>> \__/  \ | 
>>https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://www.gamerz.net/~rrognli
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>>91a45b267a47f0efffd8f8f8479b85353937a48c0b3562fd4b9efd68ed4a85
>><rrognlie at gamerz.net>
>> /  \__/ | Creator of pbmserv@gamerz.net
>> \__/    |                Helping reduce world productivity since 1994
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>
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