[Dovecot] importing outlook express messages to dovecot imap server
Hi,
I have a local Dovecot 1.1.4 running. I have a big number of outlook express messages that I like to put into Maildir so that I can use Dovecot's imap to access. I can convert them into mbox format. any available means for me to import outlook express/mbox messages into Maildir/Dovecot? command line will be preferred, Thanks,
Angelo
I have a local Dovecot 1.1.4 running. I have a big number of outlook express messages that I like to put into Maildir so that I can use Dovecot's imap to access. I can convert them into mbox format. any available means for me to import outlook express/mbox messages into Maildir/Dovecot? command line will be preferred, Thanks,
Angelo
Perhaps you can first convert them to mbox and then to Maildir. See:
Greg Pearson put forth on 6/24/2010 5:23 AM:
I have a local Dovecot 1.1.4 running. I have a big number of outlook express messages that I like to put into Maildir so that I can use Dovecot's imap to access. I can convert them into mbox format. any available means for me to import outlook express/mbox messages into Maildir/Dovecot? command line will be preferred, Thanks,
Angelo
Perhaps you can first convert them to mbox and then to Maildir. See:
Why not just setup the IMAP connection in Outlook, create IMAP folder(s) on the Dovecot server, and then just copy or move the messages over from Outlook local folders to IMAP folders? That's the simplest, most straight forward, and least wrought with potential problems, method. I've migrated many a standalone Tbird client with local storage to IMAP via this method. Works great.
-- Stan
Hi Sitan,
I think that's one option, but it's around 10G data for the last few years, and more than 100 folders under outlook express, do you think that will be fast enough by using Outlook Express copying option to an imap account?
Thanks,
On Jun 25, 2010, at 11:21 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Greg Pearson put forth on 6/24/2010 5:23 AM:
I have a local Dovecot 1.1.4 running. I have a big number of outlook express messages that I like to put into Maildir so that I can use Dovecot's imap to access. I can convert them into mbox format. any available means for me to import outlook express/mbox messages into Maildir/Dovecot? command line will be preferred, Thanks,
Angelo
Perhaps you can first convert them to mbox and then to Maildir. See:
Why not just setup the IMAP connection in Outlook, create IMAP folder(s) on the Dovecot server, and then just copy or move the messages over from Outlook local folders to IMAP folders? That's the simplest, most straight forward, and least wrought with potential problems, method. I've migrated many a standalone Tbird client with local storage to IMAP via this method. Works great.
-- Stan
Angelo Chen put forth on 6/24/2010 10:25 PM:
Hi Sitan,
I think that's one option, but it's around 10G data for the last few years, and more than 100 folders under outlook express, do you think that will be fast enough by using Outlook Express copying option to an imap account?
Look at it this way: One way or another, in one format or another, you will have to copy the data over the network from the PC to the Dovecot server. If you use the method myself and others have recommended, once the data is copied to the IMAP folders, you are done.
Now, if you do it the other way, which is copying raw files over, you then have to convert them to maildir format. It's a multi-step process. And could be error prone.
The first method is a single step process and is reliable.
-- Stan
Hi,
On 2010-06-25 03:51 UTC Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Angelo Chen put forth on 6/24/2010 10:25 PM:
I think that's one option, but it's around 10G data for the last few years, and more than 100 folders under outlook express, do you think that will be fast enough by using Outlook Express copying option to an imap account?
Look at it this way: One way or another, in one format or another, you will have to copy the data over the network from the PC to the Dovecot server. If you use the method myself and others have recommended, once the data is copied to the IMAP folders, you are done.
Now, if you do it the other way, which is copying raw files over, you then have to convert them to maildir format. It's a multi-step process. And could be error prone.
The first method is a single step process and is reliable.
I tried something similar (with Thunderbird) once, and it caused a lot of trouble. We only had around 1.3 GB, IIRC, but thousands of folders. Here is a blog article that I wrote after I got it done with a perl script:
https://patrick-nagel.net/blog/archives/77
Patrick.
-- Key ID: 0x86E346D4 http://patrick-nagel.net/key.asc Fingerprint: 7745 E1BE FA8B FBAD 76AB 2BFC C981 E686 86E3 46D4
Hi,
Nice approach, but the it's Thunderbird, what I have is outlook Express.
Angelo
On Jun 25, 2010, at 2:02 PM, Patrick Nagel wrote:
Hi,
On 2010-06-25 03:51 UTC Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Angelo Chen put forth on 6/24/2010 10:25 PM:
I think that's one option, but it's around 10G data for the last few years, and more than 100 folders under outlook express, do you think that will be fast enough by using Outlook Express copying option to an imap account?
Look at it this way: One way or another, in one format or another, you will have to copy the data over the network from the PC to the Dovecot server. If you use the method myself and others have recommended, once the data is copied to the IMAP folders, you are done.
Now, if you do it the other way, which is copying raw files over, you then have to convert them to maildir format. It's a multi-step process. And could be error prone.
The first method is a single step process and is reliable.
I tried something similar (with Thunderbird) once, and it caused a lot of trouble. We only had around 1.3 GB, IIRC, but thousands of folders. Here is a blog article that I wrote after I got it done with a perl script:
https://patrick-nagel.net/blog/archives/77
Patrick.
-- Key ID: 0x86E346D4 http://patrick-nagel.net/key.asc Fingerprint: 7745 E1BE FA8B FBAD 76AB 2BFC C981 E686 86E3 46D4
Angelo Chen put forth on 6/25/2010 1:32 AM:
Hi,
Nice approach, but the it's Thunderbird, what I have is outlook Express.
The process is the same. Outlook Express can do this also. Have you ever used OE with an IMAP connection? Do you need instructions on setting up an IMAP connection?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/264580 http://cc.jlab.org/docs/services/email/ms_outlook.html http://www.nacs.uci.edu/email/oe-win-imap.html
-- Stan
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
On Fri, 25 Jun 2010, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Angelo Chen put forth on 6/25/2010 1:32 AM:
Hi,
Nice approach, but the it's Thunderbird, what I have is outlook Express.
The process is the same. Outlook Express can do this also. Have you ever used OE with an IMAP connection? Do you need instructions on setting up an IMAP connection?
I guess he referred to the Eudora->mbox migration step, so he could try thunderbird at all.
@Angelo:
Google hits some PST to XYZ programs.
IMHO Thunderbird can import messages from pst/OE, esp. when you run it on the same computer as Outlook Express.
When you have imported them into TB, they are (more or less) mbox files located in the Imap(Mail) subdir of your profile, which you can transform with the mb2md.pl script.
=================
However, I would still at least *try* the plain IMAP method in OE.
Regards,
Steffen Kaiser -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
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Patrick Nagel put forth on 6/25/2010 1:02 AM:
Hi,
On 2010-06-25 03:51 UTC Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Angelo Chen put forth on 6/24/2010 10:25 PM:
I think that's one option, but it's around 10G data for the last few years, and more than 100 folders under outlook express, do you think that will be fast enough by using Outlook Express copying option to an imap account?
Look at it this way: One way or another, in one format or another, you will have to copy the data over the network from the PC to the Dovecot server. If you use the method myself and others have recommended, once the data is copied to the IMAP folders, you are done.
Now, if you do it the other way, which is copying raw files over, you then have to convert them to maildir format. It's a multi-step process. And could be error prone.
The first method is a single step process and is reliable.
I tried something similar (with Thunderbird) once, and it caused a lot of trouble. We only had around 1.3 GB, IIRC, but thousands of folders. Here is a blog article that I wrote after I got it done with a perl script:
It's interesting that you weren't able/willing to track down the source of the problem. It's also interesting how you mention "single drag and drop". In my experience, you can't drag/drop _folders_ in Thunderbird at all. All the migrations I've done this way required creating new folders on the IMAP server (Dovecot), group selecting all of the mail in the respective source folder, and selecting "copy" or "move" to the destination folder. I couldn't find a way to drag/drop a folder of group of folders. Care to share your secret?
I actually did some "man in the middle" transfers of mailboxen from an old Exchange 5.5 server running IMAP to a Dovecot server using the method I just described, with TBird being the man in the middle. No problems, no data loss or garbling. Worked fine. And that old Exchange box was a dinosaur, both software and hardware.
-- Stan
On 2010-06-25 3:19 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
It's interesting that you weren't able/willing to track down the source of the problem. It's also interesting how you mention "single drag and drop". In my experience, you can't drag/drop _folders_ in Thunderbird at all. All the migrations I've done this way required creating new folders on the IMAP server (Dovecot), group selecting all of the mail in the respective source folder, and selecting "copy" or "move" to the destination folder. I couldn't find a way to drag/drop a folder of group of folders. Care to share your secret?
No secret - TB used to not like dragging entire folders at all, but slowly got better - and with 3.0, it got much better.
I just tested some (moving about 4GB Sent folder to a gmail account) with 3.1rc2, and it moved everything perfectly, although it took a few hours...
There were no sub folders though... I'll test that next...
--
Best regards,
Charles
It's interesting that you weren't able/willing to track down the source of the problem. It's also interesting how you mention "single drag and drop". In my experience, you can't drag/drop _folders_ in Thunderbird at all. All the migrations I've done this way required
I migrated to my new server by drag/drop from Thunderbird. Using IMAP. Using Thunderbird 2.0.0.24. No command line needed to convert from server to server, all done via the GUI of the client.
Original server was mbox, destination is dovecot with maildirs.
The ONLY problem I had was with folders which contained a "dot" in the name. An old folder called "2010-june.providers" was understood as a folder called "providers" inside a folder called "2010-june" due to the name convention used in the dovecot server. The copy failed there and the destination dir was not behaving well.
Just deleted the erroneous destination folder, I renamed to something like "2010-june_providers" and retried from there on.
I have migrated a 3 GB account (mine) in this way.
For security I did not do "all at a time". I just moved 10 folders, upon finish 10 more folders and so on.
TB handles well if the destination folder exists. Example:
Supose I have:
old/2001 to old/2009
Spoose in the DST you already have old/1996 to old/2000
By dragging "old" onto "old" it will copy from 2001 to 2009 inside "old" at the same level than 1996 to 2000.
NEVERTHELESS IT IS TRUE that sometimes TB refuses to do the drag-n-drop. At this time, just close TB and reopen it and Drag-n-drop worked again.
Hope to help. Xavi.
-- Xavier Montero - 93 589 71 91 - 630 59 01 62 - xmontero@dsitelecom.com
Charles Marcus put forth on 6/25/2010 7:25 AM:
On 2010-06-25 3:19 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
It's interesting that you weren't able/willing to track down the source of the problem. It's also interesting how you mention "single drag and drop". In my experience, you can't drag/drop _folders_ in Thunderbird at all. All the migrations I've done this way required creating new folders on the IMAP server (Dovecot), group selecting all of the mail in the respective source folder, and selecting "copy" or "move" to the destination folder. I couldn't find a way to drag/drop a folder of group of folders. Care to share your secret?
No secret - TB used to not like dragging entire folders at all, but slowly got better - and with 3.0, it got much better.
I just tested some (moving about 4GB Sent folder to a gmail account) with 3.1rc2, and it moved everything perfectly, although it took a few hours...
There were no sub folders though... I'll test that next...
Ahh, ok. I think the last time I did such a migration was in the 2.x days, which actually wasn't all that long ago. Last fall maybe? Oct/Nov 2009? Somewhere around there IIRC.
-- Stan
hi, i just tried 3.x, it looks like i can't drag and drop sub folders, and one problem is, imap folders are on top, and local folders(imported from outlook) are below, and it has more than 300, drag and drop toward imap folders on top is very difficult.
On Jun 26, 2010, at 11:24 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Charles Marcus put forth on 6/25/2010 7:25 AM:
On 2010-06-25 3:19 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
It's interesting that you weren't able/willing to track down the source of the problem. It's also interesting how you mention "single drag and drop". In my experience, you can't drag/drop _folders_ in Thunderbird at all. All the migrations I've done this way required creating new folders on the IMAP server (Dovecot), group selecting all of the mail in the respective source folder, and selecting "copy" or "move" to the destination folder. I couldn't find a way to drag/drop a folder of group of folders. Care to share your secret?
No secret - TB used to not like dragging entire folders at all, but slowly got better - and with 3.0, it got much better.
I just tested some (moving about 4GB Sent folder to a gmail account) with 3.1rc2, and it moved everything perfectly, although it took a few hours...
There were no sub folders though... I'll test that next...
Ahh, ok. I think the last time I did such a migration was in the 2.x days, which actually wasn't all that long ago. Last fall maybe? Oct/Nov 2009? Somewhere around there IIRC.
-- Stan
Hi Stan,
On 2010-06-25 07:19 UTC Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Patrick Nagel put forth on 6/25/2010 1:02 AM:
On 2010-06-25 03:51 UTC Stan Hoeppner wrote: [...]
The first method is a single step process and is reliable.
I tried something similar (with Thunderbird) once, and it caused a lot of trouble. We only had around 1.3 GB, IIRC, but thousands of folders. Here is a blog article that I wrote after I got it done with a perl script:
It's interesting that you weren't able/willing to track down the source of the problem.
I spent some time on it, as I wrote in the blog article, but then there were just more important things to get done. The most annoying thing was, that there was no error message whatsoever. Error handling doesn't seem to be one of Thunderbird's strengths (also things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=257735 come to mind).
It's also interesting how you mention "single drag and drop". In my experience, you can't drag/drop _folders_ in Thunderbird at all. All the migrations I've done this way required creating new folders on the IMAP server (Dovecot), group selecting all of the mail in the respective source folder, and selecting "copy" or "move" to the destination folder. I couldn't find a way to drag/drop a folder of group of folders. Care to share your secret?
I don't know when you tried it, but with the version I used at the time (2.0.0.17? .18?), it was possible to copy one folder at a time from one account to another, by drag & drop. 99% of the folders were inside one top level folder, which I attempted to drag & drop, and which Thunderbird than began to upload - only to silently fail after a few sub-folders.
Patrick.
-- Key ID: 0x86E346D4 http://patrick-nagel.net/key.asc Fingerprint: 7745 E1BE FA8B FBAD 76AB 2BFC C981 E686 86E3 46D4
On 2010-06-25 10:27 AM, Patrick Nagel wrote:
I don't know when you tried it, but with the version I used at the time (2.0.0.17? .18?), it was possible to copy one folder at a time from one account to another, by drag & drop. 99% of the folders were inside one top level folder, which I attempted to drag & drop, and which Thunderbird than began to upload - only to silently fail after a few sub-folders.
I had similar experiences with those older version... but that was with a Courier-imap server...
--
Best regards,
Charles
Patrick Nagel put forth on 6/25/2010 9:27 AM:
Hi Stan,
On 2010-06-25 07:19 UTC Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Patrick Nagel put forth on 6/25/2010 1:02 AM:
On 2010-06-25 03:51 UTC Stan Hoeppner wrote: [...]
The first method is a single step process and is reliable.
I tried something similar (with Thunderbird) once, and it caused a lot of trouble. We only had around 1.3 GB, IIRC, but thousands of folders. Here is a blog article that I wrote after I got it done with a perl script:
It's interesting that you weren't able/willing to track down the source of the problem.
I spent some time on it, as I wrote in the blog article, but then there were just more important things to get done. The most annoying thing was, that there was no error message whatsoever. Error handling doesn't seem to be one of Thunderbird's strengths (also things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=257735 come to mind).
It's also interesting how you mention "single drag and drop". In my experience, you can't drag/drop _folders_ in Thunderbird at all. All the migrations I've done this way required creating new folders on the IMAP server (Dovecot), group selecting all of the mail in the respective source folder, and selecting "copy" or "move" to the destination folder. I couldn't find a way to drag/drop a folder of group of folders. Care to share your secret?
I don't know when you tried it, but with the version I used at the time (2.0.0.17? .18?), it was possible to copy one folder at a time from one account to another, by drag & drop. 99% of the folders were inside one top level folder, which I attempted to drag & drop, and which Thunderbird than began to upload - only to silently fail after a few sub-folders.
Hmm. At that time I was trying to copy folders into the main account tree, which is how they were setup on the other account. I just tried it in 3.0.5 and it works with an empty test folder created in Local Folders and dragged into the main tree of my IMAP account. IIRC this didn't work back in 2.x. I know I wasn't able to get it to work, that is. However, I wasn't working with Local Folders, but another IMAP account as the source. Maybe it was and IMAP->IMAP drag drop issue in 2.x?
-- Stan
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On Fri, 25 Jun 2010, Patrick Nagel wrote:
I tried something similar (with Thunderbird) once, and it caused a lot of trouble. We only had around 1.3 GB, IIRC, but thousands of folders. Here is a
I cannot back it, I used TB v1.5 on Linux, where you can drag & drop just one folder hierarchie, with success. In fact, I copied from one account of one server to another account on another server. It was painly slow and also caused lots of local disk I/O.
Regards,
Steffen Kaiser -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
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On 2010-06-25 2:02 AM, Patrick Nagel wrote:
I tried something similar (with Thunderbird) once, and it caused a lot of trouble. We only had around 1.3 GB, IIRC, but thousands of folders.
3.1 is *much* better now...
Now to figure out if there is a way to do this for an entire account - Inbox, Sent special folders, etc - maybe with a special/custom namespace? It would have to present all of the accounts folders as *sub-folders* of a top-level folder, so that the top-level folder could be dragged/dropped...
Timo? Does that sound crazy?
--
Best regards,
Charles
On 2010-06-24 18:19:25 +0800, Angelo Chen wrote:
I have a local Dovecot 1.1.4 running. I have a big number of outlook express messages that I like to put into Maildir so that I can use Dovecot's imap to access. I can convert them into mbox format. any available means for me to import outlook express/mbox messages into Maildir/Dovecot? command line will be preferred, Thanks,
just a thought:
- add imap account to outlook express
- copy all mails from the local mailbox to the imap folder
might be the fastest way.
darix-- openSUSE - SUSE Linux is my linux openSUSE is good for you www.opensuse.org
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On Thu, 24 Jun 2010, Marcus Rueckert wrote:
just a thought:
- add imap account to outlook express
- copy all mails from the local mailbox to the imap folder
might be the fastest way.
Maybe it's not the fastest, but it simply works.
Regards,
Steffen Kaiser -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
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participants (8)
-
Angelo Chen
-
Charles Marcus
-
Greg Pearson
-
Marcus Rueckert
-
Patrick Nagel
-
Stan Hoeppner
-
Steffen Kaiser
-
Xavi Montero