[ale] POP-to-IMAP (dovecot) conversion

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Fri Jun 30 12:10:37 EDT 2006


An easy way to do this is to use thunderbird itself.

Create the new imap account and leave the old pop alone except to turn
off the auto checking for new messages. Create new folders to mirror the
old structure. Now drag the old folders content from the pop account to
the new imap folders. <ctl>-A to select all and drag-n-drop _or_
copy-n-paste. Now the old mail will be on the server instead of the
client.

On Fri, 2006-06-30 at 09:36 -0400, J. D. Pearson wrote:
> Hey ALE'rs,
> 
>       I am trying to migrate some people from POP to IMAP so that the 
> user's old email is accessible from multiple clients. Currently the 
> users are running Thunderbird or Netscape on Redhat so their email is 
> stored in their home directory (such as /home/user/.thunderbird). I 
> would like to somehow copy their old email into IMAP but have been (so 
> far) unable to find a recommended way of doing this.
> 
> After configuring thunderbird to use an IMAP account it creates a mail 
> directory in the users home (ex: /home/user/mail). I have tried copying 
> the users old mail from 
> /home/user/.thunderbird/niy65vn6.default/Mail/192.168.1.15/Inbox.sbd/
> 
> to
> 
> /home/user/mail.
> 
> I can then go into thunderbird and click "File" and "Subscribe" to make 
> the mail viewable in the new imap account in thunderbird. There are 
> problems with this though:
> 
> 1. Cannot create subdirectories in the email client.
> 2. Some of the imported subdirectories give error messages on trying to 
> access them or are displayed with a .sdb extension.
> 
> Is this a problem between mbox and maildir formatting?
> Is there a correct or funcional way to do this? A cleaner way to 
> approach it perhaps? What do you all think or suggest?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> J. D.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part




More information about the Ale mailing list