On 4/18/2013 1:51 AM, Rich Wales wrote: > I have some questions about whether I should set up folders under > INBOX vs. having them outside the INBOX namespace. > > I'm setting up a new Dovecot 2.2.0 on an Ubuntu 12.04.2 server. > > My plan is to move my users (family members) to this new server from > an old Cyrus server. > > Everybody is currently using (and will continue to use) IMAP, and > either Thunderbird or SquirrelMail as their e-mail client. > > I'm using the maildir mailbox format on this new Dovecot server. > > No one is using the new Dovecot server yet, so I'm still free to do > additional tweaking of the server configuration. > > When I used imapsync to copy everyone's mail to the new server, I > found that all the folders (other than INBOX) were renamed. On the > old Cyrus server, all the folders are subfolders of INBOX, but the > folders on the new Dovecot server are not. (For example, a folder > named "INBOX.Dovecot" on the old server was renamed to "Dovecot" on > the new server by the imapsync utility.) > > Can I just keep things this way on the new server? Or are my users > going to run into problems if folders are not all under INBOX? I > do realize that IMAP servers can be set up either to put everything > under INBOX, or not, but I'm not familiar with all the pros/cons.
It's a new server which requires a new MUA configuration, folder subscriptions, etc. Any mail sorting or other folder based MUA rules will have to be rewritten regardless. So the namespace hierarchy shouldn't really matter from a technical standpoint. What matters is if your family members are able and, more importantly, willing, to adapt to a new namespace layout. > And if I do need (or want) to put all the folders under INBOX, can > I simply rename the existing folders in each user's Maildir (and > also edit folder names accordingly in everyone's "subscriptions" > file)? Or will Dovecot be broken unless I recopy everything from > scratch (with a command-line option to imapsync to put everything > in the INBOX destination namespace)? I don't think your directory renaming method will work, at least not in isolation. I think you'll still need to tweak your Dovecot namespace config. -- Stan
