[Dovecot] how to best import Evolution/Thunderbird mail into dovecot?

Christoph Anton Mitterer calestyo at scientia.net
Fri Oct 19 02:32:59 EEST 2012


Hi Rick and Robert.

Thanks for the tools... I'll have a look over them. :)


On Wed, 2012-10-17 at 15:53 +0000, Rick Sanders wrote:
> Your best bet for a clean migration is to use an IMAP migration tool (assuming
> both of your servers support IMAP).  It avoids all of the issues surrounding the
> underlying databases used to store the mailboxes and messages since everything
> is done through IMAP commands.
Well the problem is that
a) the mboxes are already mixed up (with respect to different formats),
which was basically my fault.
b) Evolution is severely broken, amongst others for this
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686258 reason.

So I cannot really trust that automatic migration will work.


>     imapsync: http://imapsync.lamiral.info
>     imap_tools: http://www.athensfbc.com/imap_tools
>     offlineimap: https://github.com/nicolas33/offlineimap
>     mbsync: http://isync.sourceforge.net/
>     mailsync: http://mailsync.sourceforge.net/
>     mailutil: http://www.washington.edu/imap/ part of the UW IMAP tookit.
>     imaprepl: http://www.bl0rg.net/software/ http://freecode.com/projects/imap-repl/
>     imapcopy: http://home.arcor.de/armin.diehl/imapcopy/imapcopy.html
>     migrationtool: http://sourceforge.net/projects/migrationtool/
>     imapmigrate: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cyrus-utils/
>     larch: https://github.com/rgrove/larch (derived from wonko_imapsync)
>     wonko_imapsync: http://wonko.com/article/554
>     pop2imap: http://www.linux-france.org/prj/pop2imap/
>     exchange-away: http://exchange-away.sourceforge.net/
For most of them, I unfortunately didn't found information on whether
they support the different subformats of mbox... what about your
MboxtoIMAP.pl ?


Right now I tent to create my own converter based on mb2md... just that
I don't write out maildir but again mbox.




Timo, when you're reading this:
I'm not sure though, on which headers I must/should stripe for dovecot?
From http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/mbox#Dovecot.27s_Metadata
I'd guess that I have to drop all X-IMAPbase, X-IMAP and X-UID. (Will
dovcote recreate them, when it indexes the mbox file the first time?)

And I have to manually create/calculate, Status, X-Status, X-Keyword
(based on what either Evolution or Thunderbird set) and also
Content-Length... the "From_" lines in the mails need then to be _not_
quoted.



Thanks,
Chris.
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