Hi, ive walked into a enviroment where the previous admin has being using pop and making the email clients leaving a copy of the mail on the workstation.. Now overtime these mailboxes (mbox format) have grown between 1,5 to 1,8 Gigs large I want to convert all these mailbox to IMAP (only 15) and want to know whats the largested suggest folder size per user dovecot IMAP runs smoothly with good responce times.. I know the users also have large OUT LOOK pst files 4.5GIGs and wondering if I could also intergrate that into IMAP? Please any feedback would be great on this topic..??
Benjamin R. Haskell
2007-Oct-15 16:17 UTC
[Dovecot] Converting Outlook .PST's (was: Suggested IMAP Directory Size..)
On Mon, 15 Oct 2007, Ilo Lorusso wrote:> [...] > I know the users also have large OUT LOOK pst files 4.5GIGs and wondering if > I could also intergrate that into IMAP?It can be done, but it is a nightmare. For post-2003(?) Outlook .PST's, the only sensible, non-commercial path I could find was through Thunderbird's import. Uploading directly to the server (Even if you ran a local server!) was horrendously, painstakingly slow, and rendered the Outlook user's computer unusable for that time. (If you're feeling lucky, Google libpst. Maybe your Outlook is old enough that it supports the format.) Via Thunderbird: 1. Open all the .PST's you want to convert in Outlook, and, if possible, make sure those were the only .PST's open. 2. Be sure to 'compact'/'compress' each one, to get rid of deleted messages (excluding those in 'Deleted Items'. Uggh.). 3. Make sure Outlook is completely closed, and not accessing any .PST's. 4. Open Thunderbird. 5. Import mail from Outlook. This gets you mbox files with the same hierarchy that you had in Outlook. I then wrote some Perl scripts to deal with these. In my case, I was combining several users' folders into a single shared hierarchy. Maybe you can run some mbox2maildir program and be done with it. Caveats: - If possible, change the location of Thunderbird's profile directory to a short path name. (e.g. C:\convert) The default path to local folders: C:\Documents and Settings\%USER%\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\(random string)\Mail\Local Folders means that approximately 100 of your 255-character limit for filenames are chewed up. - Thunderbird will mangle folder names that contain 'odd' characters. I never figured out what characters caused trouble, but the following were definitely OK: [A-Za-z0-9. ] (I found the odd foldernames running: find (dirname) -type d | perl -lnwe 'print if /[\da-f]{8}/' They always ended in a string of hexadecimal digits.) - Thunderbird doesn't seem to like non-Latin-1 headers. (I didn't find this out until someone noticed it a while after the conversion.) This means QP-encoded headers. (In my case, ISO-2022-JP.) Best of luck. I don't envy your task. :-) -- Ben
on 10/15/2007 8:52 AM Ilo Lorusso spake the following:> Hi, > > ive walked into a enviroment where the previous admin has being using pop > and making the email clients leaving a copy of the mail on the workstation.. > > Now overtime these mailboxes (mbox format) have grown between 1,5 to 1,8 > Gigs large > > I want to convert all these mailbox to IMAP (only 15) and want to know > whats the largested suggest folder size per user dovecot IMAP runs > smoothly with good responce times.. > > I know the users also have large OUT LOOK pst files 4.5GIGs and wondering if > I could also intergrate that into IMAP? > > > Please any feedback would be great on this topic..?? >I have some users that have let their inboxes get to a gig with no noticeable speed problems except when you delete stuff from the middle with clients like thunderbird that want to purge on every delete. If you purge as a seperate step, it isn't as noticeable. I have some little used folders of things like logwatch e-mails that are several gigs large, and I can read and search them fairly quickly. The indexes in dovecot help a lot. Wuimap would slow to a crawl on large boxes. -- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!!
On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 17:52 +0200, Ilo Lorusso wrote:> Hi, > > ive walked into a enviroment where the previous admin has being using pop > and making the email clients leaving a copy of the mail on the workstation.. > > Now overtime these mailboxes (mbox format) have grown between 1,5 to 1,8 > Gigs large > > I want to convert all these mailbox to IMAP (only 15) and want to know > whats the largested suggest folder size per user dovecot IMAP runs > smoothly with good responce times..If old messages are deleted, maildir would work a lot faster than mbox. If not, Dovecot shouldn't have problems even with huge mbox files as long as you set mbox_very_dirty_syncs=yes. >4GB files should work, but they haven't been tested much.> I know the users also have large OUT LOOK pst files 4.5GIGs and wondering if > I could also intergrate that into IMAP?Sure, if you can figure out how to convert them. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20071020/159d2381/attachment-0002.bin>
on 10/20/2007 1:56 PM Timo Sirainen spake the following:> On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 17:52 +0200, Ilo Lorusso wrote: >> Hi, >> >> ive walked into a enviroment where the previous admin has being using pop >> and making the email clients leaving a copy of the mail on the workstation.. >> >> Now overtime these mailboxes (mbox format) have grown between 1,5 to 1,8 >> Gigs large >> >> I want to convert all these mailbox to IMAP (only 15) and want to know >> whats the largested suggest folder size per user dovecot IMAP runs >> smoothly with good responce times.. > > If old messages are deleted, maildir would work a lot faster than mbox. > If not, Dovecot shouldn't have problems even with huge mbox files as > long as you set mbox_very_dirty_syncs=yes. >4GB files should work, but > they haven't been tested much. > >> I know the users also have large OUT LOOK pst files 4.5GIGs and wondering if >> I could also intergrate that into IMAP? > > Sure, if you can figure out how to convert them. >One more note on this; Since Outlook PST files can have multiple folders, but mbox files can't, the process of creating the folders on the server and migrating the mail there might break up the size of the PST files. -- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!!