{
 "id": 39596,
 "slug": "dovecot-2-4-mail-location-has-changed-how-to-migrate",
 "url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/dovecot-2-4-mail-location-has-changed-how-to-migrate/",
 "language": "en",
 "title": "Dovecot 2.4 mail_location Has Changed — How to Migrate",
 "subtitle": "The mail_location setting has been split in Dovecot 2.4 — here's the new syntax.",
 "summary": "One of the biggest breaking changes in Dovecot 2.4: the mail_location setting no longer works the old way. It's been split into separate settings for mail format and path. Here's how to update your configuration.",
 "topics": [
  "linux",
  "server"
 ],
 "created": "2026-04-03T19:31:09.224000+02:00",
 "updated": "2026-04-03T20:17:05.662000+02:00",
 "full_article_url": "https://willem.com/en/2025-06-04_breaking-changes/",
 "author": {
  "name": "Willem L. Middelkoop",
  "url": "https://willem.com"
 },
 "note": "A short distillation of a longer willem.com post. Not currently published on willem.com itself.",
 "answers_question": "What replaced mail_location in Dovecot 2.4?",
 "text": "In Dovecot 2.3, you had a single `mail_location` setting like:\n`mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir`\nIn Dovecot 2.4, this has been split. You now need to configure the mail driver and path separately within `mail { }` blocks. The exact syntax depends on whether you use Maildir or mbox format, and whether you're using virtual users with SQL.\nThis is one of the changes that trips up most administrators during the upgrade — the old setting is silently ignored, and mail delivery fails without useful error messages.\nWillem's complete guide walks through every configuration change step by step, including SQL passdb/userdb migration and Sieve plugin updates.",
 "markdown_url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/dovecot-2-4-mail-location-has-changed-how-to-migrate/snippet.md"
}