I recently stumbled upon a problem of a big evolutionary grown qmail/vpopmail installation when we moved the installation to a new server.
Virtual accounts created years ago were created with a different vpopmail installation located in a different filesystem path. For this reason accounts had different paths set up in the /var/vpopmail/domains/domain.tld/vpasswd.cdb file. Regrettably there is (at least afaik) no possibility to change these paths with vpopmail commands like vmoduser or similar.
To avoid always creating symbolic links from the old directories to the new account directories I found a way to modify/update these paths. Normally values in the plain text vpasswd (not the .cdb one mentioned before) file get overwritten every time you update/delete or create accounts with the values from the vpasswd.cdb file. However if only the vpasswd file and not its .cdb counterpart is present the vpasswd.cdb file will be regenerated with the values from the vpasswd file.
So if you want to change paths, do the following:
#copy old vpasswd to a new location
cp vpasswd vpasswd.new
# edit vpasswd.new to suit your needs
vim vpasswd.new
# shutdown your mailserver services for some seconds to prevent regeneration of the vpasswd.cdb file before you are ready (check if you may do this before!)
/etc/init.d/svscan stop
cp vpasswd.new vpasswd
#remove cdb file
rm vpasswd.cdb
# create a testuser for the appropriate domain, to regenerate cdb file
vadduser testuser@domain.tld
# delete testuser
vdeluser testuser@domain.tld
# start mailserver services again
/etc/init.d/svscan start
Normally a shutdown time of a few seconds should not be critical for a mailserver, because sending servers normally have queue lifetimes much longer than this and sending users can wait a few seconds anyway, eh ;-)?
You should however check this first!
If you put the lines above in a appropriately changed script downtime can be less than 5 seconds.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
Phillip