Moving mail to a new machine

[Gordon]

> Gordon wrote:
> 
>> I previously had my imap server running on one machine that I had set 
>> up myself. I had several folders beside my inbox. I recently built a 
>> new machine with a new version of Redhat and I've built and installed 
>> the latest version of cyrus.
>>
>> I have cyrus running and configured but I'm having a heck of a time 
>> getting to my old mail files. What I've done is copy the whole 
>> directory tree of my mail files to the directory 
>> /var/spool/imap/g/user/gmc. I've gone into cyradm and created a 
>> mailbox called user.gmc and set the acl to write. I use mozilla for 
>> email and I was able to set it up and I can now see the emails from my 
>> old inbox. The problem is that I can't figure out how to get to the 
>> email that are in the other folders. They're in directories under the 
>> directory stated above. Can anyone help with this bit? Was there an 
>> easier way to do this?
>>
>> Gordon
>>
> 
> 
I finally got it worked out yesterday and this is what I did. It's not 
pretty, pretty ugly in fact, but it appears to have worked. Remember 
that the machine I'm moving my mail to I a brand new installation so I 
have the luxury of being able to break things and try them again.

1. In cyradm I ran "cm user.gmc" to create my mailbox.
2. In mozilla mail, I added an account to access the imap server. I was 
able to see the new inbox so that was well.
3. Also in mozilla mail, I started creating folders and subfolders to 
match the directory structure that I had on my old machine. I now had a 
directory /var/spool/imap/g/user/gmc with a bunch of subdirs for the 
folders.
4. Shutdown the cyrus server. May or may not be necessary, but I didn't 
want to corrupt anything by having cyrus running at this point.
5. Cd to /var/spool/imap/g/user/gmc and run "rsync -av -e ssh 
oldmachine:/var/spool/imap/user/gmc/ .". This operation copied the mail 
files and cyrus metafiles from the old machine to the new machine. Since 
I had CAREFULLY created the directory tree already using mozilla mail 
and MADE SURE the directory tree was the same between the old machine 
and new machine, I now had populated mail folders.
6. Restart cyrus and check that I could see the messages in mozilla.