[Dovecot] Mixing mbox and maildir

Robert Cooper rac at noidea.us
Wed Dec 22 04:22:10 EET 2004


(er...meant to send this to the list....)

One thought, since I'll be doing this conversion once I get my new 
mailserver in place...

Since I've only got 3-4 users, I'm planning to just open IMAP mailboxes 
on both servers in Thunderbird, and drag the messages from the old 
server (using mbox) to the new (using Maildir).  However, It would 
require two boxes, or two IMAP servers running on different ports, and 
would not be sufficient for more than, say, 5-8 users.

RobertC

Rory Campbell-Lange wrote:
> On 21/12/04, Kenneth Porter (shiva at sewingwitch.com) wrote:
> 
>>Is there some way to add a maildir folder to a mbox hierarchy? My folders 
>>are all mbox, but I want to migrate some client-side mail from a client 
>>(PMMail2000) that stores messages as individual files, and it might be 
>>easiest just to dump all the files into a maildir directory with suitable 
>>naming.
> 
> 
> You probably want to make everything the same format, using mb2md.
> 
> I'm not clear how to do this myself. One way is to resubmit them to your
> mail program and get it to rewrite new spools, eg do a fetchmail to
> download POP3-hosted mboxes and these will be rewritten to your new
> format. Unfortunately this runs under the user who invokes fetchmail, so
> domain-wide email can't be processed usefully in this way for several
> users, as far as I know.
> 
> Another way might be to use batched smtp format (bsmtp), and inject them
> into your mailer as a trusted user (eg using exim's -bS option). I don't
> know how to convert mboxes, etc into bsmtp formatted files though.
> 
> Rory
> 


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