Migrating from uw-imapd to Dovecot

From the I-should-have-done-this-much-earlier department … I recently migrated my IMAP daemon from uw-imapd to Dovecot.

For those of you who wonder what on earth I’m talking about: uw-imapd and Dovecot are so called IMAP servers, IMAP being a protocol that allows you to read your e-mails (a bit like POP3 but IMAP is designed to allow managing mails on the server, supporting stuff like folders and so on). I mostly use IMAP to access my mail through a web interface (using RoundCube Webmail that is) when I’m not at home and while uw-imapd worked fine for me as far as functionality was concerned, one of my mail accounts with thousand mails in its Inbox would always take ages to access. Knowing that, I started looking around for alternatives to uw-imapd and found the Courier IMAP server but that one would’ve required me to change my mailbox format from ‘mbox’ to ‘maildir’ which in turn would have forced me to reconfigure all other programs handling mail on my machine (the SMTP server being the most scary one). Months went on and then I finally stumbled across Dovecot which can apparently handle my mbox-type mailboxes. (more…)