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NILI have been using mbox format for a few years on my personal mail
server. For those who don't know what mbox is, it consists of only one
file per folder you have on your mail client, each file containing all
the mails of the corresponding folder. It's extremely ineficient when
you backup the mail directory because it must copy everything each
time. Also, it reduces the system cache possibility of the server
because if you have folders with lots of mails with attachments, it
may not be cached.
Instead, I switched to maildir, which is a format where every mail is
a regular file on the file system. This takes a lot of inodes but at
least, it's easier to backup or to deal with it for analysis.
Here how to switch from mbox to maildir with a dovecot tool.
# dsync -u solene mirror mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=~/mail/inbox
That's all ! In this case, my mbox folder was **~/mail/** and my INBOX
file was **~/mail/inbox**. It tooks me some time to find where my
INBOX really was, at first I tried a few thing that didn't work and
tried a perl convert tool named **mb2md.pl** which has been able to
extract some stuff but a lot of mails were broken. So I have been
going back getting dsync working.
If you want to migrate, the whole process looks like:
# service smtpd stop
modify dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf, replace the first line
mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u # BEFORE
mail_location = maildir:~/maildir # AFTER
# service dovecot restart
# dsync -u solene mirror mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=~/mail/inbox
# service smtpd start