On 16/11/2009, Andreas Ntaflos daff@dword.org wrote:
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.
Thanks much for your thorough answer! I'll make sure to test extensively.
One thing came to mind - would it be possible to use Dovecot and Disconnected IMAP itself for the transfer, and perhaps thus keep the indexes? If I move the messages from the local mailbox to the IMAP mailbox from within Kmail it should perhaps keep the status?
Also - is there any documentation anywhere (or tips on better google search terms) on what is stored in these indexes? I suppose apart from Read/New status, it also contains whether or not there have been replies to the mail and on what date the email was replied to?
Thanks again!