How to convert from mbox delivery to maildir?

Didar Hossain didar.hossain at gmail.com
Thu Jul 30 06:33:10 UTC 2009


On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 1:31 PM, Neil Bird<neil at fnxweb.com> wrote:
>
>  I had a problem in another thread in which it was suggested I use maildir
> instead of mbox as a spool store.  I've had a good old google around, and I
> can't for the life of me find any one place that really tells me anything.
>
>  Does anyone have any pointers?
>
>
>  For ref., I have a fetchmail -> sendmail -> procmail set up (although the
> sendmail/procmail are pretty much the default install), which dump incoming
> mail to /var/spool/mail/<user> [I have spamassassin in the equation as well,
> with one proc recipe to dump spam into a sep. spool mbox].
>
>  I then use dovecot with IMAP/POP locally to get that mail into ThunderBird,
> and also serve it up (that that's still in the spool) from squirrelmail.
>
>  I plan to fully move all incoming mail accesses to IMAP, with users (well,
> the family :) ) filing from the IMAP Inbox to local folders as and when,
> with no POP fetching or auto copying frmo the IMAP folder into Local/Inbox.
>  For that, it'd be good to have a reliable mail store, which sounds like I
> need to bin the spool area.
>
>  How does 'maildir' fit into this?  What manitains it?  Where would
> root's/other-local mail go - still to /var/spool?

Dovecot supports Maildir natively, but, not Sendmail. Since, you are
already using procmail, there should be no problem delivering to
Maildir format. Here are a couple of links to help you understand more
about this format -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir
http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir

Also, you might find the `mb2md' perl script useful to convert your
current Mbox mails to Maildir -

http://www.gerg.ca/hacks/mb2md/

NOTE: I have used the above script before and it has worked for me,
however, standard precautionary practice of taking a backup and
performing a test deployment applies.

Didar




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