Pixelastic

I have previously blogged on how I migrate mails from one IMAP server to another. Today I had to migrate some mails again.

My client's staff wasn't happy about the GMail webmail we gave them. The lack of a true "Draft" feature (one tha could be used and reused) had them drop a lot of productivity, so we decided to get back to Squirel Mail.

I started by manually recreating all the email adresses on the back-end on the Dreamhost server. Once at least one address is created, Dreamhost automatically creates the matching A and MX records.

I had to update my zone file on my registrar to update the previously MX and A records that were set to point to Google and updated to point to Dreamhost. I have to use an intermediate zone file on my registrar because I'm dealing with a limitation of the .fr TLD here.

Once the zone were updated and changes repercuted accross the network, I connected to the new Squirel mail. My inbox was empty.

So I ran imapsync to copy all mails from the google hosted service to my new server.

The syntax to be used is a little different than the one I mentioned on my previous post, so here it is :

imapsync --host1 imap.gmail.com --ssl1 --authmech1 LOGIN --user1 foo@domain.fr --passfile1 /path/to/pass1 --host2 208.97.*.* --user2 foo@domain.fr --passfile2 /path/to/pass2 --useheader="X-GMail-Received" --useheader 'Message-Id' --noauthmd5

After that, I reloaded my Squirel Mail inbox, and it was populated. I just had to do that for every account.

I'll finally have to migrate mails from one IMAP server to another because of a change in the hosting provider of one of my clients.

Let me first do a quick review of my current config :

I have an IMAP server on a not-so-reliable host. I need to move all the mailboxes to a brand new Dreamhost server.

The current host use horde/imp as its webmail, but Dreamhost is running under Squirel Mail.

How to do that ?

When I first contacted Dreamhost to ask them the better way to copy the content of my old IMAP server to their new one, they told me that IMAP to IMAP transfer was unfortunatly not possible.

After some digging I found a little linux tool called imapsync that was developped to synchronize two IMAP servers. As I only wanted to copy content from one server to an empty one, I guess it should work.

And it does.

Installing the tool

First of all, you really need to have a Linux machine. I'm sorry for all Windows and Mac users out there, but this solution will only work with Linux.

Obviously, you'll first have to download and install it.

I'm a newbie linux user, and don't use it at its full potential. It means that I rely a lot on the UI, I don't know most of the more basics commands.

So, I don't know the correct procedure to install something, I always use the Synaptic Packager Manager UI. I just have to type imapsync, check its checkbox and start the install.

I guess you, more experienced linux user, would know how to do that anyway.

Running the command

Once it's installed, you'll just have to run one command. But before typing it, you have make sure that you have all the required informations.

You'll need the server name, login and pass of both the source and destination account.

In my case I had previously reset all the password to newly generated one on the source server, then created the same email (with same password) on the destination server.

For the source server name, you shouldn't have any problem finding it. It usually is something like mail.domain.com.

But for the destination server, that's a little more tricky. As I haven't yet changed DNS, I have a Dreamhost server but no domain name pointing to it. So I can't use mail.domain.com there.

I had to go my Dreamhost DNS panel (clicking on DNS under the name of my domain in Manage domain) and check for the IP address associated with the mail A entry.

Once you have all this, create a file (name it pass) which contain the password of your account (or pass1 and pass2 if source and destination password aren't the same). This is done so you won't type in clear text the password of your accounts, or they could be found in the history files.

Once it's done, just run the following command

imapsync --host1 mail.domain.com --user1 contact@domain.com --passfile1 /path/to/pass1 --host2 208.97.XXX.XXX --user2 contact@domain.com --passfile2 /path/to/pass2 --noauthmd5

It is not an instant process, actually in can be quite long. One of the mailbox I had to move had more than 20.000 mails in the sent folder and about 40.000 in the received one. It took me almost 18h to complete.