Migrating maildirs - Courier to Dovecot

Ervin Hegedüs airween at gmail.com
Thu Sep 21 22:48:44 EEST 2017


Hi,

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 07:34:47PM +0100, Stroller wrote:
> I apologise, because I'm sure this subject has been done to death, but I want to migrate from Courier to Dovecot.

currently, I'm working on the same project here,

> I think my main question is whether there's any reason I shouldn't just rsync the maildirs across from the old mail server to the new one? 

probably that's not enough, to make a complete and clean
migration, you'll be happy with the courier-dovecot-migrate.pl
script:

http://www.dovecot.org/tools/courier-dovecot-migrate.pl

That converts all structure in-place from Courier to Dovecot.
 
> There aren't many clients using this server, so I don't care if clients have to redownload all their messages (in fact, I expect they'll probably end up doing so anyway).

without that the POP3 clients downloaded again all messages, but
with that script, most clients was able to switch as
transparently. (Except the MS Office Outlook - but that's not a
"client" in my opinion... :))

> I'd like to preserve read/unread status of each message, but can't think of anything else important.

the read/unread status had been kept in case of IMAP, but the MS
Office downloaded again through POP3, when I skipped the script
above.
 
> It doesn't matter if there's a few hours of downtime, but I thought to use rsync because I figured I copy the maildirs a day or two ahead of time, and then a sync immediately before going live will be quicker.
> 
> Using imapsync [1] looks pretty good, and I'm happy to use that if it'll be "cleaner" or help Dovecot to create its hierarchy more neatly.

I didn't checked it, just doveadm ... imapc: command. The result
was fine, but the POP3 redownload was annoying.
 
> It looks like Courier creates a courierimapuiddb, courierimapkeywords and courierimapacl in each folder - can I not just delete these, and hand Dovecot a bunch of maildir directories and files to reindex for itself?

I kept them...
 


a.

-- 
I � UTF-8


More information about the dovecot mailing list