[Dovecot] Migrating existing local Maildir structure to dovecot server Maildir

[Andreas Ntaflos]

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

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