vm-pop3d to dovecot, existing email as new

[MaartenS]

Good day to you all,

We're using DirectAdmin on a lot of our servers and are currently in the process of migrating the last of our legacy servers from vm-pop3d to dovecot. It's only a few of them left and, technically, the full migration works like a charm. With one issue.

All existing emails that are in the users inboxes, are marked as unread. For IMAP users, that means that their complete inbox is popping up as unread (easily solved by a 'select all', followed by 'mark as read'). The real problem lies in the POP3 users. Because as soon as they log in, they start downloading all messages that were left as a copy on the server again, duplicating every email in their inbox.

I've searched far and wide, high and low, through forums, Google, Bing and all other parts of the internet, but nowhere have I found any mention of this issue, let alone a solution. When we did the initial migration years back, we suffered from the same problem and were unable to find a cure for it then, so I was hoping that with this last run, we could avoid the issues.

Is there someone who recognises these issues, who has run into them and who knows a solution? Is it a configuration we overlooked? Or should we shut down vm-pop3d before the ./build todovecot command?

Many thanks in advance for your help and suggestions!

 

[zEitEr]

Hello,

When utilizing IMAP dovecot uses flags which it adds to a filename to mark an email unread/read. An unread email:

1440977989.M53293P3835.server.domain.com,S=11631,W=11896:2,

becomes read with:

1440977989.M53293P3835.server.domain.com,S=11631,W=11896:2,S

S - mark added at the end of the file.

Check this for an idea (do use it on your own risk, I've never tested it): http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2009-January/036332.html

 

[MaartenS]

Hello,

When utilizing IMAP dovecot uses flags which it adds to a filename to mark an email unread/read. An unread email:

1440977989.M53293P3835.server.domain.com,S=11631,W=11896:2,

becomes read with:

1440977989.M53293P3835.server.domain.com,S=11631,W=11896:2,S

S - mark added at the end of the file.

Check this for an idea (do use it on your own risk, I've never tested it): http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2009-January/036332.html

Hi zEitEr,

Thank you for your quick reply. Funnily enough, I figured that the S flag meant that the message was already read, so I checked the files after the migration and, sure enough, found the S flag in the filenames. Still, customers complained about receiving the mail twice.

Does the S flag apply to POP3 users, leaving a copy on the server, too? Or do POP3 mail clients use a different strategy to recognise whether an email has already been downloaded locally?

 

[zEitEr]

When POP3 checks the messages it's technically reads the messages. So the read emails will have flag S. And you might need to move them from /new directory to /cur.