Recently, I changed the IMAP daemon used in IEAA server from UW-IMAPd (which is using mbox format) to Dovecot. The transition is easy, but not trivial as I originally expect. Here are the steps if you want to do so:
- apt-get install dovecot-imapd, usually, your old imapd would be removed
- then, edit
/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
, simply change the lineprotocols=
, to make it support for imap protocol on 143 port - make sure
default_mail_env = mbox:%h/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
, which should be suitable for most cases - now the most tedious thing: for every user, go to his home directory
- create the directory
~/mail
to store the users’ own mail box (non-INBOX boxes) - create
~/mail/.subscriptions
to list the mail boxes, which is exactly the same function (and format) as~/.mailboxlist
, so you can simply issuemv .mailboxlist mail/.subscriptions
- move the old mbox files to
~/mail
- create the directory
Done.
BTW: If you’re using any IMAP clients (e.g. Mozilla), better clean up all their cache or otherwise, there would be some strange behavior on the clients.