Where does Dovecot store mail?

Maildir mails are almost always stored in ~/Maildir/ directory, which contains cur/, new/ and tmp/ subdirectories. In maildir each mail is stored in a separate file, while with the mbox format one file contains all mails in the mailbox.

Is Dovecot a mail server?

Dovecot Server. Dovecot is a Mail Delivery Agent, written with security primarily in mind. It supports the major mailbox formats: mbox or Maildir. This section explains how to set it up as an IMAP or POP3 server.

What is correct mailbox format?

MBOX (sometimes known as Berkeley format) is a generic term for a family of related file formats used for storing collections of electronic mail messages. MBOX formats store all of the messages of an entire folder (not an entire mailbox) in a single database file and new messages are appended to the end of the file.

Is mbox compressed?

Similar compression technology is implemented into the consolidation of multiple email messages into MBOX files.

Can I delete .mbox files?

mbox format. After archiving a mailbox, you can delete it (or at least the messages it contains). Mail lets you archive a mailbox in the . mbox format to get ancient messages out of your way.

What is a dovecot email server?

Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 email server for Linux/UNIX-like systems, written with security primarily in mind. Dovecot is an excellent choice for both small and large installations. It’s fast, simple to set up, requires no special administration and it uses very little memory.

What is the use of mail_location in Dovecot?

mail_location setting in dovecot.conf is used if nothing else overrides it. mail User Databases (userdb) overrides mail_location setting. location setting inside namespaces overrides everything. Usually this should be used only for public and shared namespaces.

Does Dovecot support IMAP and POP3 workarounds?

Dovecot supports workarounds for several bugs in IMAP and POP3 clients. Since the workarounds may cause the protocol exchange to be sub-optimal, you can enable only the workarounds you need. Dovecot tries to be admin-friendly.

What are the advantages of Dovecot?

Dovecot supports easy migration from many existing IMAP and POP3 servers, allowing the change to be transparent to existing users. Dovecot is self-healing. It tries to fix most of the problems it notices by itself, such as broken index files. The problems are however logged so the administrator can later try to figure out what caused them.