How do I move a Maildir to a subdirectory of another user?

Question

When an employee has left the company I want to move their entire Maildir to be a folder in an "old employees" account.

Given that Maildir uses the filesystem exclusively, I feel it should be possible to just mv ~fred/Maildir ~oldemployees/Maildir/fred or similar.

If I do that, how to I trigger the mail client to notice there's a new directory?

Answer 1

Given that Maildir uses the filesystem exclusively, I feel it should be possible to just mv ~fred/Maildir ~oldemployees/Maildir/fred or similar

It depends on dovecot configuration

By default dovecot use Maildir++ layout to store the email.

• ~/Maildir/new, ~/Maildir/cur and ~/Maildir/tmp directories contain the messages for INBOX. The tmp directory is used during delivery, new messages arrive in new and read shall be moved to cur by the clients.
• ~/Maildir/.folder/ is a mailbox folder
• ~/Maildir/.folder.subfolder/ is a subfolder of a folder (ie. "folder/subfolder")

So, in this case you can use command

mv ~fred/Maildir ~oldemployees/Maildir/.fred

You can also optionally use the "fs" layout by appending :LAYOUT=fs to mail_location. This makes the folder structure look like:

• ~/Maildir/new, ~/Maildir/cur and ~/Maildir/tmp directories contain the messages for INBOX, just like with Maildir++.
• ~/Maildir/folder/ is a mailbox folder
• ~/Maildir/folder/subfolder/ is a subfolder of a folder

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If I do that, how to I trigger the mail client to notice there's a new directory?

It also depends on mail client.

My Squirrelmail always subscribe new folder automatically. Thunderbird required you to click [File] - [Subscribe...] and activate new folder so it appear in the screen.

Answer 2

On our IMAP server with Dovecot, I do it like this, to copy a whole Maildir hierarchy into a subfolder of another user's mail box:

Define variables so that rest can be copy/pasted

olduser=martina
olddir=/home/$olduser/Maildir

newuser=jasmin
newgroup=users
newdir=/home/$newuser/Maildir
newfolder="Martina"
newdest="$newdir/.$newfolder"

Move all folders and subfolders into a subfolder of another user

mkdir -v "$newdest"
for d in cur new tmp; do mv -vi "$olddir/$d" "$newdest/"; done

# Move only folders which contain mails,
# and exclude some special folders like Trash, etc.

cd $olddir
for d in .??*; do
  if [[ "$d" =~ ^.(Junk|Trash)$ ]] || [ -z "$(find "$d"/{cur,new,tmp} -type f)" ]; then
    echo ignore "$d"; continue;
  fi;
  mv -vi "$d" "$newdest/$d";
done

# subscribe new user to new folders

find "$newdir" -maxdepth 1 -type d -name ".$newfolder*" -printf "%f\n"
 | while read d; do echo ${d/#./}; done
 | cat - "$newdir/subscriptions"
 | sort -u > "$newdir/subscriptions.new"

mv "$newdir/subscriptions.new" "$newdir/subscriptions"

# fix ownership/permissions

chmod -R u=rwX,go=          "$newdir"
chown -R $newuser:$newgroup "$newdir"

# Check ownership/permissions
find "$newdir" -not -perm 700 -type d -ls
find "$newdir" -not -perm 600 -type f -ls
find "$newdir" -not -user  $newuser   -ls
find "$newdir" -not -group $newgroup  -ls

Answer 3

1. doveadm mailbox create '!!New folder 2!!' -u touser@example.com
2. doveadm mailbox subscribe '!!New folder 2!!' -u touser@example.com
3. doveadm copy -u touser@example.com '!!New folder 2!!' user fromuser@example.com mailbox 'Old folder' ALL