Migrating INBOX

[taoeffect]

Related issues: #50, #52, #47

1. Migrate using larch --all
2. Iterate over subfolders of INBOX using doveadm mailbox list -u {{ email }} "INBOX.*"
3. If a mailbox of the same name as that subfolder exists in the parent directory already (mailbox A), move all of the email inside of A into the subfolder (mailbox B), delete A, then move B up one directory

Note that some people actually have INBOX.INBOX. If this is found, skip it and all subfolders of INBOX.INBOX.

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[taoeffect]

Relevant documentation:

• http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Tools/Doveadm/Mailbox
• http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Tools/Doveadm/Search
• http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Tools/Doveadm/Move

Example: List info about all top-level mailboxes

This will show how the size of all top-level folders and how many messages are in them:

doveadm mailbox list -u [email protected] \
    | grep -v "INBOX." \
    | xargs -I {} doveadm mailbox status -u [email protected] "messages vsize guid" {}

[taoeffect]

Example: Move messages in root folders into corresponding INBOX. folders

Note that this command skips the messages in INBOX (unlike the previous example) as it does grep -v "INBOX" instead of grep -v "INBOX.".

The sed command is used to handle folders with spaces in their name.

[email protected]
doveadm mailbox list -u $EMAIL \
    | grep -v "INBOX" \
    | xargs -I {} doveadm mailbox status -u $EMAIL messages {} \
    | grep -v "messages=0" \
    | sed -n 's/\(.*\) messages=.*/\1/p' \
    | xargs -I {} doveadm move -u $EMAIL "INBOX.{}" mailbox "{}" ALL

Note the quotes around "INBOX.{}" and "{}"! These are important to handle mailboxes with spaces!

[taoeffect]

Important note on use of separators!

The example at the bottom here indicates that the folder separator may be a variable, so it's best to write these scripts like "INBOX${SEP}{}" instead of assuming it's . as in "INBOX.{}"

Relevant links on where this setting is stored:

• http://wiki.dovecot.org/Namespaces
• http://wiki.dovecot.org/UserDatabase/ExtraFields

In my case the separator was stored like so:

$ doveconf -S namespace/inbox/separator
namespace/inbox/separator=
$ doveconf -S namespace/default/separator
    # empty results, nothing returned

Where doveconf -S namespace returned:

namespace=inbox
namespace/inbox/name=inbox
namespace/inbox/type=private
namespace/inbox/separator=
... [snip] ...

The file /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf states:

The default however depends on the underlying mail storage format.

And the rules for that are outlined here, and apparently there are two types of separators ("layout" and "namespace" separators).