wagner wagner@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