Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 157061
dovecot does not understand mmdf format mail boxes
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:17 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050426 Red Hat/1.7.7-1.4.2.centos4 Description of problem: On upgrading from readhat 9 to RH E4 I find that I can no longer use the IMAP (& POP) daemon provided to access my mail boxes. I keep mail boxes in mmdf format since it is superior to plain mbox format. This is more of a problem in the choice of dovecot as an IMAP daemon. It means that an upgrade has been more difficult than it should have been. I have mailed the dovecot maintainer, but not heard anything back. In the mean time I have installed wu-imap. Other than that -- thanks for a good product. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Connect using pop3 or imap and try to read mail - dovecot fails since it does not recognise the mail box format. Additional info:
Did you look at the contents of this directory? /usr/share/doc/dovecot-*/UW-to-Dovecot-Migration It does not specifically handle mmdf format, but mmdf is so close to mbox it shouldn't be hard. One could argue that maildir is superior to both mbox and mmdf, dovecot supports maildir and the above can help you migrate. The truth is, mmdf is not common enough for us to go out of our way to support mmdf. The MTA's we ship either use mbox, maildir, or lmtp. As a consequence I'm sorry to say I don't think mmdf support is something we would put engineering work into. If subsequent releases of dovecot support mmdf that support will of course be included in our distribution, however as you probably inferred from the lack of response from Timo I don't think mmdf is high on the feature list for dovecot. I suspect for pretty much the same reasons, flat files are not efficient and mmdf usage currently is minimal.
I have now heard from Timo, he says that he has plans to implement MMDF after he has hit v1.0. I shall stick with UW-imap 'till then. I can't find a file like UW-to-Dovecot-Migration on my machine or in the source RPM, but that is not important. I was not suggesting that RedHat make the changes themselves, my purpose in reporting it was that it is something that you should know about & perhaps put on a FAQ or something. mmdf format is superior to mbox format, but I don't propose to start a war on the topic. Thanks for your reply & a great product.