[ale] Extracting dovecot email

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 2010-11-17 at 08:44 -0500, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> The other directories I was speaking of correspond to the user’s OTHER
> folders (e.g. Sent and others like one named GKAdvantage that is
> unique to this user).  I can see the full message in the web view of
> these folders but the files in these directories are NOT the same as
> the ones in “cur” so do need some method of being extracted.   As I
> noted in my original post the files in these directories are dovecot
> cache files.   Simply viewing them as I do the ones in cur only shows
> me header information – I can not see the body of the email so my
> assumption is it is encoded within the cache file as described.   It
> is these other folders I would like to extract.   Is there a way to
> extract from the cache to get the individual files like the ones seen
> in cur?  

Without seeing what you're talking about, I'm a bit lost.  My dovecot
maildir setup does not seem to share this property; all files are indeed
messages in all of the user's custom folders.

To clarify a bit, a maildir has metainformation, and always three
directories: cur, new, tmp.  You'll nearly never see anything in tmp,
it's just a staging area that is used when mail is initially dropped.
Then the message is moved to new, then when the IMAP client logs in they
are moved again to cur.

At the root of the maildir, if you do this:

$ find . -type d -name cur -o -name new

You'll get a list of all of the message-containing directories in the
maildir tree.  THe index, cache, etc., aren't necessary since all mail
systems that I am aware of will generate their own when presented with a
mail store that has yet to be indexed.

If your setup isn't working this way then I'm not able to help any
further; I'd start looking at the configuration or source code patches
on your local install to see if anything has been changed.

	--- Mike
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