[Dovecot] integration of old mails into new dovecot Maildir

[Steffen Kaiser]

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On Sun, 13 Apr 2014, K. C. Mohan wrote:

Please, do not top post.

> Thank you Steffen, for addressing my problem of migrating old mails into new 
> mail server. I went through the article you pointed to but could not 
> succueed. I will appreciate if you could guide me to step by step process to 
> migrate the mails. My old mail server used 2.x dovecot version.

you post very little information:

1) how are the messages storred on the old server, which storage backend 
do you use, maybe Maildir?

2) the storage backend on the new server?

3) do you care about the message UIDs?

4) How many users do you have (approx.) and can you access the user's 
mailboxes via IMAP, e.g. using a master user or do you know their password 
or can you switch to a known password during migration of one particular 
user?

5) Did you've changed namespaces?

- From your first post I figure that the basic mail server functionality of 
the new server is working, most importantly login, message delivery and 
retrieval.

> -----Original Message----- From: Steffen Kaiser
> Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 6:14 AM
> To: K. C. Mohan - Personal  s
> Cc: dovecot at dovecot.org
> Subject: Re: [Dovecot] integration of old mails into new dovecot Maildir
>
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> On Tue, 8 Apr 2014, K. C. Mohan - Personal wrote:
>
>> I just installed dovecot 2.2.9 on to a new server and want to transfer all
>> the old mails into the email accounts I imported from the previous server
>> into MySQL database. I am not able to view the subfolders and or old mails
>> that I copied into their respective maildir folders. I was very much
>> appreciate if anyone could let me know how to import old mails into the new
>> server. All I see, is the new mails that have come into the account since I
>> started dovecot service in the new server.
>
> Check out http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Migration . Read esp. about "preserving
> messages' UIDs".
>
> If the old server uses Maildir, too, and you don't care about the UIDs,
> copy the files over and you are done.

- -- 
Steffen Kaiser
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