Transfer or Archival of Dovecot Accounts

[Stefan Malte]

Hello,

We have the following situation: We are using Dovecot on several
Mailservers administered via
ISPConfig. The servers all use old versions of Debian and ISPConfig and my
job - I joined the company as a Linux system administrator 6 months ago -
is to consolidate these old servers into one new server I already set up. I
did a trial run with one user from one company by way of duplicating her
account on the new server, creating a new mail account in her outlook and
changing the MX record from the old to the new server. This works. This was
rather time-intensive and I still have to face the problem of what to do
with the existing mail data once we shut down the old servers one-by-one.
Is there a way to move or even better integrate the data from the old
mailbox on the old server to the new mailbox on the new server without any
user intervention?

https://pypi.org/project/dovecot-archive/ looks promising, but it assumes a
situation we don't have: In our case the original user and the user in
whose mailbox the data should be stored have the same email address. I am
very open to suggestions on how to do this the smart way. Even manually
entering the users' account data by hand on the new server is very time
consuming. At the same time this is a much needed opportunity to weed out
old mailboxes and forwardings which are not used any more. Even complete
domains on the old servers have proven to be not in use anymore - the
client company switched to Exchange online according to the MX record and
failed to inform us. Anyway, this is a huge load of work and I'd rather
spend more time preparing correctly and efficiently repeating simple tasks
again and again. I am grateful for any advice. After all, this situation is
certainly not unique.

Yours faithfully
Stefan Malte Schumacher
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