[Imap-uw] mbx and the necessity of ~/INBOX

[Jeroen van Aart]

Kaljio wrote:

> Hello,

> 

> is it possible to move from mbox to mbx while keeping the old "mbox"

> files (/var/mail/$username) _and_ let the users have their IMAP folders

> in their home directory (/home/$username/...)?


Yes, it's what I did. On debian as user $username:
mailutil move INBOX "#driver.mbx/INBOX"

Moves the /var/mail/$username to /home/$username/INBOX and keeps the 
original /var/mail/$username, which imap uses to move incoming mail out 
of and into /home/$username/INBOX. I hope I said it right. ;-)

Additionally you can move other folders in the same way. Say "mailutil 
move Trash "#driver.mbx/Trash_"" and then "mv Trash_ Trash" in that case 
you end up with an mbx Trash. Maybe stop your MTA while you do all this, 
but it can be done fine mostly with the MTA running.

I converted all users that way and the only issue sometimes is missing 
client flags. Not a big deal.


> uw-imap then moves it to ~/INBOX but this is not usable in our setup as

> ~ is a NFS mount on the real machine (on the testing machine it was a

> local mount).


But I see though my solution doesn't fully apply to your situation 
because you are using NFS. As far as I know you are stuck with using 
UNIX format with NFS, or else things may break. The mailutil command 
remains similar, something like:
mailtuil move INBOX "#driver.mbox/mbox" (didn't try that).
As user $username.

Hope that helps,
Jeroen