Brandon Allbery writes: > On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 11:03 PM, Matt Lawrence > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Ok. I guess my biggest concern is how to migrate my inbox. > Hopefully the Dovecot and/or the Cyrus documentation will give me > some clues. Like I said, I haven't touched a mail server > configuration in many years and that was to configure greylisting. > > IMAP servers don't really support "migration" as such, because the IMAP > protocol strongly discourages it. In particular, Cyrus uses its own > folder format that should only be managed by Cyrus itself (dovecot uses > Maildir). You migrate by using a mail client to create folders and move > messages into them.
IMAP supports migration just fine, in the sense that it provides a storage-independent method for downloading messages from *and uploading them to* remote folders folders. As long as you can set up IMAP servers that can handle both formats, there are a number of tools that you can use to move mail from one to the other, and let the IMAP sever back-ends handle the storage format conversions implicitly. (Dovecot is a handy choice for conversion between mbox and the other common Maildir format since it directly supports both.) In configurations where you need to handle very large folders I strongly suggest something like Maildir because it has much better performance, although Dovecot's indexing functionality can also get you a performance boost for some operations on mbox folders. In addition to moving messages by hand using Alpine or other common IMAP mail clients, the PINE distribution used to come with a "mail-utils" package that includes several command-line tools for manipulating IMAP mail via the same c-client library that is used in PINE and Alpine. I've even built auotmated tools using those. In addition there's a bundle of Perl scripts called "imap-utils", and a shareware program called "imapsync" that seems to be more industrial-strength, in case you happen to have to do this alot. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
