[H-GEN] Email migration

Sarah Walters sarah at walters.id.au
Tue Mar 29 17:15:25 EST 2005


Michael Anthon wrote:

> Nikolai Lusan wrote:
>
>> Firstly I thought I would ask for opinions on which imap server I 
>> should use (I am thinking courier ATM for the possibility to extend 
>> into evolution calendar sharing etc.).
>
> I use courier here, don't have any major complaints with it.  No 
> opinion on calendar sharing since I don't do it.

I've never tried courier so don't have an opinion there, but I'm mostly 
happy with cyrus. The only potential issue is migration of the mailbox 
flags (read, replied, etc) if you want to upgrade bdb. That said, I just 
did a migration between servers and had no issues once I worked out the 
process (documentation is less than brilliant). The advantage of cyrus 
is that there's a separate file per email, plus a database to keep track 
of everything, so it's very robust.

> As someone else suggested, set up the imap system and then drag and 
> drop via a client, might be a tad slow over a network but it's dead 
> simple

Ditto on the drag-n-drop if there aren't too many users. Alternatively 
you can use the IMAP libraries in Python (or Perl, or your language of 
choice) to script the move. I've seen this done successfully on about 
20,000 mailboxes.

> I use real accounts on the system and use maildir folders for each 
> user (the IMAP server simply gives access to ~/Maildir for each 
> user).  Delivery via procmail is a snap with this setup and works very 
> well.  The extra benefit here is that you can also access the maildir 
> folders using mutt.  Not quite sure how that would work with virtual 
> user accounts though as I've never investigated that.

Mutt can access an IMAP server just fine. Personally, I don't think that 
all users should have an account on your server - it's just one more 
thing that you have to lock down.

Sarah





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