Migrating Courier imap to dovecot
The first catch with this migration has been the differing ways dovecot and courier-imap represent their folder hierarchies. After reading the following piece in the dovecot docs, I figured they’d behave the same way:
We support Courier-compatible Maildir++. INBOX is the ~/Maildir directory, all the other folders named as ”.<folder>.<subfolder>.<etc>” under it, any directories not starting with a dot are simply ignored.
However, While courier IMAP presents subfolders as subfolders of INBOX, dovecot presents them as root folders. so:
- /INBOX/lyx-devel
becomes
- /lyx-devel
So my filters will need a little tuning.
On the plus side, squirrelmail is running smoothly, while it’s not as pretty as the IMP, it’s perfectly functional and much faster.
My next challenge is to try and get Postfix configured for all the domains I host and with all the external forwarding working.
Gavin Henry July 4th, 2004 @ 09:28 PM
How did you get on with your migration? I am in the process of thinking of migrating to dovecot.
Thanks.
Koz July 5th, 2004 @ 02:34 AM
Hey Gavin,
The migration went perfectly, I had a pretty simple server-side setup. Just ~/Maildir/ with folders as & when the users wanted them. Pretty much the default configuration as well. Dovecot read all the Maildirs without a hitch and it’s not given me grief, except for an OpenSSL bug(crasher) that has been fixed.
The only gotcha was the structure. Under Courier all the users’ folders were subfolders of INBOX i.e
INBOX ->/spam-mail ->/news ...
Under dovecot they’re root folders i.e
INBOX spam-mail news
So I and my ~5 users had to manually change any client-side filters. If you have lots of users, that’s something you may want to be wary of. Anyway, good luck and let me know how it goes.