[Dovecot] entourage pop to dovecot imap migration

[Channing]

wagner <wagner at wagnerone.com>:

> I'm beginning to migrate my years of mail stuck in Entourage 2004  
> (MacOSX) to dovecot imap on Fedora FC4. No matter how I have tried I  
> cannot get the status flags to migrate. Eg: all the mail, once  
> transfered from the pop archive to the imap server looses all Status: 
>  and X-Status: flags and ends up being marked "new" on the imap side.
>
> After lots of testing it appears that, while simply having both pop  
> and imap configured Entourage and dragging messages from the pop  
> config to the imap area does move messages, all flags are lost. This  
> also is the case if I export Entourage folders as mbox files and then 
>  import them into the imap server with Entourage or Mail.app.
>
> Has anyone else came upon this obstacle? Any advice? I am in the  
> process now of gathering information to facilitate my own "migration  
> utility". It seems the Entourage DB keeps the read/flagged/replied  
> flags for each message in its own internals and doesn't deem it  
> worthwhile to export them as part of it's mbox export nor retain them 
>  as Status or X-Status flags when moving messages from its pop DB to  
> the imap server.
>
> I believe I can write a script to work on a set of found, for  
> example, "replied to" messages to add an "X-Status: A" to their  
> headers before moving them to the imap server. Same for "read" and  
> "flagged" MS DB internals to Status/X-Status headers. With these  
> headers added, moving them to the imap server, from my limited  
> testing would seem to be the method to keep those status flags per  
> message? Does dovecot use those flags or does it have its own means  
> of storing that status information? Will it at least use those in the 
>  messages to populate its DB if it does have its own method?
>
> Flags I've identified so far:
>
> Status: O - old
> Status: RO - recent old(?)
> X-Status: A - replied to
> X-Status: F - flagged
>
> Thanks for any insight or suggestions.
> Mike

Mike,

I'm not sure this would work, but something I've observed is that once 
I 'view' a message with my client, the message is renamed with a 
capitol 'S' at the end.  You could try renaming one of your test 
messages in this way to see if that is the effect you are looking for.

     i.e. - 1131486278.15664_2.example.com:2,            would be 
renamed to:            1131486278.15664_2.example.com:2,S

Hope this helps,
Channing