well, for the .subscription/mailboxlist issue, name can be trivially changed in src/lib-storage/subscription-file/subscription-file.c, and i believe it is based on the root of the mailbox.
Yes, in dovecot .subscription is on the MAILSUBDIR directory, i.e. in the dir specified by mbox:..., while in uw-imap the .mailboxlist is always in $HOME, whatever path is used for mailboxes subdir.
so if we want to be compatible we could change the name to .mailboxlist provide a default_mail_env like mbox:%h/:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u:INDEX=%h/.imapidx
As I said for imap using mbox:%h/ as default is a bad, as it would have access to the whole $HOME, and sadly the default rule used by 99.9% of mail clients is to have an empty subdir path for IMAP folders...
The migration tools should be done using some simple script to be used in %trigger* section of SPEC file. Such script should just SCAN /home/<users> for finding .mailboxlist (users who don't have .mailboxlist in their home don't need changes as they never used IMAP) and move them to the appropriate repository. Ditto for the migration script for imap when "mailsubdir" is changed from '' to 'Mail'. Such script should just read the .mailboxlist files and move folders listed there from $HOME to $HOME/Mail. IMHO they are quite easy/trivial to write.
The same tools should do the reverse migration dovecot => imapd. Furthermore as I said if we would use the rule of using the same Mailsubdir name either in dovecot and in imapd, we wouldn't even need to move mailboxes, and also all the mail clients we have would be happy in using an empty mailsubdir path.
put in a readme the steps that should be taken to change the mail directory and have the startup script for dovecot bitch until it is fixed.
IMHO, this "compatibity" to subscribed folders should be added by the dovecot author, using some switch in conf file (someone suggests him then), as it claim to be "fully compatible" with
UW-IMAP and Courier-IMAP. In this way it will be "maintained", and
we don't have to redo the whole thing at every dovecot release. Since also this
seems apparently quite easy, probably it wouldn't require him more than 5 minutes for
implementing.
well, mta fortunately only append data to the mailbox, so the index does not have to be rewritten from scrach. a totally different issue is users with shell access that manage their mailbox with mutt.
INBOX mailbox(es) could also be accessed at the same time in POP3/POP3s mode...
featurewise cyrus is much more complete than courier (mailbox acl, shared folders, filtering language, full text searches (if you have the disk space that is)) but it is an overkill for very small systems and it shares the same problem with courier, that there is not a clean migration path from uw. This is why i proposed dovecot, it should receive broad testing to see if it is a viable solution for replacing uw, but i don't see it easy for 9.2.
Another alternative would be also to include the "maildir" patch for uw-imapd.
BTW, Have you tried bincimap?
Why don't do a serious test with uw-imapd, cyrus-imap, courier-imap and dovecot, but with a certain amount of messages, i.e. more than
Well, I have migrated some hundred users (60GB of mail) from uw to cyrus same hardware, it got from unusable to good performing (i don't have numeric data for this, but user response was good) Is there an imap benchmark tool we could use to do these tests?
AFAIK remember there was something here:
http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/
http://dovecot.procontrol.fi/dovecot-benchmark.txt
btw speaking of cyrus, what about putting the dirsync patch in the kernel?
That's for Juan.
Bye. Giuseppe.
