[Dovecot] Shutting down my Dovecot server?

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:12:15 +0100, Bjørn T Johansen said:
> I am planning to shut down my own Dovecot server and start using the
> other Dovecot server I am administering together with a friend..
> 
> And I was thinking that I don't want to copy the emails I have on my
> server so I want to start from scratch on the other server.. But I
> would like to be able to look at the old emails if I need to, so was
> wondering if there is a way to do this without using an imap server?
> Can I convert my mails stored in the maildir format to mbox or is
> there a better way to solve my problem?

I'm not sure why you want to convert to mbox, especially when there are
multiple mbox versions.

I'm also not sure why you don't want to copy emails. How else would
they appear on the new server. I suppose you could use rsync to copy
the data itself.

You use Claws-Mail. If I were in your shoes, I'd bring up the empty
Dovecot server and make a new Claws-Mail account for that empty server.
Then in Claws-Mail I'd use the copy feature to copy whole folder trees
to the new server. Once that's done, I'd reconfigure your original
Dovecot so it can serve only on its local machine, and bang, you have
your new server, with old emails you can look at.

This is similar to the procedure I used to move my Kmail folders (over
100K messages) to Dovecot.

http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/201202/201202.htm

HTH,

SteveT

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