[neomutt-users] Help with maildir setup

[Wim]

Hi Dominik,

On Thursday, 28 October at 13:38, Dominik Vogt wrote:

> I've been using mutt/neomutt for ages, archiving old messages in
> various mailboxes.  This has gotten out of hand because of the
> size of the archive files.
>
> The setup looks like this:
>
>  * Exim pipes incoming mail through sortmail ($HOME/.forward),
>    filtering out some spam, writing a copy to $HOME/Mail/_maillog.
>  * Everything that is not dropped by the sortmail filter is then
>    delivered by Exim as usual to the file /var/mail/USERNAME.
>  * $HOME/Mail/in is a symlink to /var/mail/USERNAME.
>  * From there I store the messages sooner or later in other
>    mailboxes or delete them.  ($HOME/mail/foo etc.).
>
> So, I'd like to use a maildir setup instead and split the old
> mailboxes into individual messages.  I don't care about the format
> of the "in" file, though.
>
> For a first step I need to convert the mailboxes to maildirs and
> tell neomutt that everything below $HOME/mail except $HOME/mail/in
> is a maildir.
>
> Can you give me a hint how to do this properly, without losing new
> incoming mail during the transition?
>

One: Stop Exim (ie 'systemctl stop exim4' or 'exim stop')

Two: Backup up your mail directories ie those under $HOME/mail.

Three: Convert the mbox directories to maildir directories.

https://www.akadia.com/services/converting_mbox_mdir.html

Four: Adjust your muttrc according to your setup.

Here's an example:

# Mailbox Setup
set folder = "~/mail"
set mbox_type = "Maildir"
mailboxes +Oldbox +Drafts
set record = "+Oldbox"
set postponed = "+Drafts"
set move = "no"

Five: Restart exim.

> Ciao
>
> Dominik ^_^  ^_^
>
> --
>
> Dominik Vogt
>
>

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