Any problem keeping dovecot IMAP indexes & control files in ~/Maildir?

This is where I originally had them. But after fixing my broken virtualmin (see other ticket I just opened) by running apt-get install virtualmin-base, their locations were changed to:

/var/lib/dovecot-virtualmin/index/u% and /var/lib/dovecot-virtualmin/control/u%

Today I set both back to the default (~/Maildir) in order to resolve an issue for my customers. But I don't want this to come back & bite me in the future. Is there a problem with having them in ~/Maildir? Is it possible that a future update will change the setting again, causing more issues for my customers?

Is it recommended to have them be in /var/lib/dovecot-virtualmin? If so, why? For security so people don't accidentally wipe them out via FTP, etc.?

Is there are recommended way that we could move them from ~/Maildir to /var/lib/dovecot-virtualmin? I supposed I could write a bash script to do this using a loop.....?

I appreciate your feedback here.

Thanks,

Doug

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

I don't know if it will attempt to move them in the future, Jamie would probably need to comment on that.

But that one directory is used in order to make them all easy to back up, as well as allow folks to place /var/ in a separate partition if desired.

However, it's perfectly fine to use ~/Maildir -- I use that on my own system (it was a previous default) and hadn't ever run into trouble.

There isn't a recommended way to move them though.

Thanks for the response. Out of curiosity, what would be the real-world benefit to putting these on a separate partition?

They won't get moved unless you re-run the install script.

The downside to using ~/Maildir is that if a user runs out of disk quota, he won't be able to delete email to free up quota as Dovecot won't be able to write to the index and control files (because the user is over quota!)

A hah. That's a good reason.

Thanks

Doug

I'm going to close this ticket. Thanks for your assistance.