MBox is the original and ancient format for storing mail on Unix systems, it consists of a single file per user under /var/spool/mail that has messages concatenated. Obviously performance is very poor when deleting messages from a large mail store as the entire file has to be rewritten. Maildir was invented for Qmail by Dan Bernstein and has a single message per file giving fast deletes among other performance benefits. An ongoing issue over the last 20 years has been converting Mbox systems to Maildir. The various ways of getting IMAP to work with Mbox only made this more complex.
The Dovecot Wiki has a good page about converting Mbox to Maildir [1]. If you want to keep the same message UIDs and the same path separation characters then it will be a complex task. But if you just want to copy a small number of Mbox accounts to an existing server then it’s a bit simpler.
Dovecot has a mb2md.pl script to convert folders [2].
cd /var/spool/mail mkdir -p /mailstore/example.com for U in * ; do ~/mb2md.pl -s $(pwd)/$U -d /mailstore/example.com/$U done
To convert the inboxes shell code like the above is needed. If the users don’t have IMAP folders (EG they are just POP users or use local Unix MUAs) then that’s all you need to do.
cd /home
for DIR in */mail ; do
U=$(echo $DIR| cut -f1 -d/)
cd /home/$DIR
for FOLDER in * ; do
~/mb2md.pl -s $(pwd)/$FOLDER -d /mailstore/example.com/$U/.$FOLDER
done
cp .subscriptions /mailstore/example.com/$U/ subscriptions
done
Some shell code like the above will convert the IMAP folders to Maildir format. The end result is that the users will have to download all the mail again as their MUA will think that every message had been deleted and replaced. But as all servers with significant amounts of mail or important mail were probably converted to Maildir a decade ago this shouldn’t be a problem.