[Dovecot] Mailbox conversion/importing

[Robert Brockway]

On Mon, 10 Jun 2013, Alan Brown wrote:

> I've been tasked with importing a large bunch of mbox folders (about 500) 
> into an existing mdbox setup in Dovecot 2.1
>
> As far as I can see, dsync "mirror" or "backup" are both inappropriate ways 
> of doing this. Does anyone have any suggestions about how I could proceed?

I've done a variety of mail migrations over the years, including some that 
were quite large (hundreds of thousands of accounts).  I looked at a few 
options when doing the first one and ended up concluding that pop/imap was 
the best way to go.  A specialised migration tool must be less tested (and 
perhaps more buggy) than pop/imap servers that are in use around the world 
constantly.  By using pop/imap proxies we were able to do migrations that 
were completely transparent to users.

This presumes that you are migrating from one server to another.  I've 
always done it like this, rather than having to worry about multiple 
storage formats on the one server.

Cheers,

Rob

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