[Dovecot] Migrating existing local Maildir structure to dovecot server Maildir
Andreas Ntaflos
daff at dword.org
Mon Nov 16 13:26:10 EET 2009
On Friday 13 November 2009 15:00:09 Halim Issa wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm about to migrate a number of existing users who have been using
> POP3 with emails stored locally in KMail's Maildir format into an
> IMAP solution based on Dovecot.
>
> Will it be possible to simply move all the KDE Maildir folders from
> the local PCs to the Maildir folder on the IMAP server running
> Dovecot and then have the emails accessible on the server, or will
> this most likely mess up the Dovecot index files?
>
> If this causes index file trouble, is there any way to force a
> re-indexing of all these files, or is there another recommended way
> of migrating up to 7 years of email communication from local hosts to
> the IMAP server, for later putting them in folders?
I don't think the migration of the Maildir structure itself is the
problem. Dovecot has no problem reading it, no matter where it came
from, as long as it is a proper Maildir structure. Existing indexes
should not be affected.
The indexes that KMail writes, however, will probably not migrate well
or at all. I do not know anything about the index format KMail uses but
converting it to something Dovecot understands and accepts seems
troublesome and difficult to me.
This means that you can copy all existing, local Maildirs over to the
server (you can even put them in subfolders in existing accounts) and
Dovecot will read them just fine. But it also means that Dovecot will
very probably present them to the user as new messages, never seen
before.
But do yourself a favour and test any procedure you plan on implementing
properly and extensively before actually implementing it. Otherwise it
could end up messy and irreparable.
HTH
Andreas
--
Andreas Ntaflos
Vienna, Austria
GPG Fingerprint: 6234 2E8E 5C81 C6CB E5EC 7E65 397C E2A8 090C A9B4
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20091116/23e2ff46/attachment.bin
More information about the dovecot
mailing list