Re: Upgrading James, how to merge maildirs

Hello Marc,

First and foremost, Maildir implementation is long unmaintained, and
prove to be vulnerable [1].

We put great efforts to provide smooth migrations for all mailbox
implementation. According to your sayings we failed to do so. If this
was needed this w=shows the lack of attention the MailDir implementation
did receive.

We discussed a few month before to drop MailDir implementation as part
of 3.7.0 release (Maildir would still be supported on 3.6.x branch). [2]
I know the MailDir word is appealing as it is the de-facto
implementation in most email servers and on-filesystem yet it was buggy,
brittle, unmaintained, vulnerable, and thus did not keep it up with the
promise in its name.

SOHO/HomeOperator are invited to switch to the 0-dependency alternative
which is the JPA implementation with an embedded database like derby. I
recommend a clean IMAPSync to do the MailDir-JPA implementation, [3]
which can be done in a matter of minutes.

Might you encounter issues on this journey I would be happy to help.

[1] http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2021-40525
[2] https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg70909.html
[3]
https://github.com/apache/james-project/blob/master/server/apps/distributed-app/docs/modules/ROOT/pages/operate/migrating.adoc
(also applies for JPA <-> MailDir migration)

Best regards,

Benoit TELLIER

On 23/01/2022 06:49, Marc Chamberlin wrote:
> Hello,  I am a small SOHO/Home operator of a James server, running it
> on OpenSuSE 15.2 and am in the midst of trying to upgrade it from a
> snapshot version of 3.4 to 3.6, but before jumping that far, I
> downloaded and installed the released version of 3.4 thinking that
> upgrading from the snapshot version to 3.4 released version would be
> the safest first step. It hasn't gone well and I have been jumping
> back and forth between these two versions while discovering and fixing
> problems as they show up. (Mostly things like missing jar files or
> wrong versions of them, and miss-configurations)  Anywise I am now
> noticing a divergence in the maildir databases, new folders added,
> emails in one version but not in the other etc.
>
> So I am wondering if there is a tool or some other means to do a merge
> by hand. I tried/attempted some obvious things such as simply copying
> maildir folders across from one database to the other and updating the
> subscription lists but that alone didn't work. So I could use some
> guidance and/or pointers to documentation that describes how James
> models, uses, and makes changes to it's maildir database. The James
> website does not provide much in the way of documentation nor has
> Google been helpful.
>
> Thanks in advance for taking the time to help me with this issue
> and/or provide advice.    Marc
>
>