dovecot - Jan 2012 - IMAP to Maildir Migration preserving UIDs?

Hello all,

I'm facing the need to migrate from a proprietary IMAP server to 
Dovecot. The migration must be as smooth and transparent as possible.

The mailbox format I would want to use is Maildir++.

The storage format used by the current server is unknown, and I don't 
look forward to trying to reverse-engineer it. This leaves me with the 
option of reading the mailboxes using IMAP. There are tools like 
offlineimap or mbsync, and they do store the UID and UIDVALIDITY info. 
The last piece of the puzzle is a process to properly create the 
dovecot-uidlist and dovecot-uidvalidity files. So far I wasn't able to 
find anything on this. Are there any tips? Are there any tools available 
to do this job, or part of it?

In either case I need this done, and I'll have to create whatever I 
can't find available. If there isn't anything out there that I'm yet
to
become aware of, then I'm looking at creating something like an 
offlineimap post-processing routine?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Gedalya

On 2012-01-25 11:31 PM, Gedalya <gedalya at gedalya.net>
wrote:
> This leaves me with the option of reading the mailboxes using IMAP.
> There are tools like offlineimap or mbsync,
Not familiar with those, but I think imapsync will do what you want?

http://imapsync.lamiral.info/

I do see that it references those two though...

-- 

Best regards,

Charles

On 26.1.2012, at 6.31, Gedalya wrote:
> I'm facing the need to migrate from a proprietary IMAP server to
Dovecot. The migration must be as smooth and transparent as possible.
> 
> The mailbox format I would want to use is Maildir++.
> 
> The storage format used by the current server is unknown, and I don't
look forward to trying to reverse-engineer it. This leaves me with the option of
reading the mailboxes using IMAP. There are tools like offlineimap or mbsync,
and they do store the UID and UIDVALIDITY info. The last piece of the puzzle is
a process to properly create the dovecot-uidlist and dovecot-uidvalidity files.
So far I wasn't able to find anything on this. Are there any tips? Are there
any tools available to do this job, or part of it?
Get Dovecot v2.1 and configure it to work. Then for migration add to
dovecot.conf:

imapc_host = imap.example.com
imapc_port = 993
imapc_ssl = imaps
imapc_ssl_ca_dir = /etc/ssl/certs
mail_prefetch_count = 50

And do the migration one user at a time:

doveadm -o imapc_user=USERNAME -o imapc_password=PASSWORD backup -R imapc:

On Thursday 26 January 2012 04:31:20 Gedalya wrote:
> I'm facing the need to migrate from a proprietary IMAP server to
> Dovecot. The migration must be as smooth and transparent as possible.
Ignoring the migration of individual mailboxes addressed in other replies, I 
trust you've met Perdition - very useful for this sort of situation,
	http://horms.net/projects/perdition/

to provide an IMAP "Server" (actually proxy) that knows where the real
mailboxes are located, and directs connections accordingly. That way you can 
migrate mailboxes one-by-one as you've migrated them, helpful to test a few 
mailboxes first without affecting the bulk of users' mailboxes atall.

cheers,

Andrew.

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:31:20 -0500, Gedalya wrote:
> I'm facing the need to migrate from a proprietary IMAP server to
> Dovecot. The migration must be as smooth and transparent as possible.
setup dovecot and make it listen on 127.0.0.2 only, modify your current 
to only listen on 127.0.0.1 this so you now can have 2 imap servers 
running at the same time

next step is here

http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-migrate-mailboxes-between-imap-servers-with-imapsync

when all accounts is transfered, stop the old server, make dovecot 
listen on any ip, done, it worked for me when i changed from 
courier-imap to dovecot