Preserving seen state when converting from mbox

[Ken Murchison]

Take a look at the mailutil program in the UW-IMAP distro.


Etienne Goyer wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> I am currently migrating a mail server running qpopper to Cyrus imapd.
> Part of the job involve migrating the user mailbox in mbox format to
> Cyrus.  A lot of these users use pine and other POP client that set
> X-UIDL or Status header to set a kind of "seen" flag.  Since the
> migration have to be transparent, it is required to preserve that flag.
> 
> The user base will continue to use POP for a while with their current
> client (eventually migrating to IMAP).  I make the assumption that
> setting the Seen flag on the revelant messages will make the Cyrus pop3d
> behave the same as qpopper wrt to these messages.  Is this correct ?
> 
> For the moment, I thought of three way I could migrate the mailboxes.
> 
> My first plan was to use a script I dug from this mailing list called
> mboxtocyrus.  It split the mbox file in messages with formail and inject
> them with deliver.  However, the "seen" state is not preserved.  Reading
> the deliver man page, I can't find a way to have it set the Seen flag.
> I wish I could have used that option since I feel it would have been the
> simplest and fastest (I have about 20 GB of mbox to migrate) way to do
> my migration.  Is there a way I could preserve the Seen state with
> deliver ?
> 
> My second plan is to follow the first one and work around the problem by 
> writing a Sieve script that will look for the X-UIDL or Status header 
> and set the Seen flag accordingly at delivery.  If somebody already have 
> such a Sieve script, I would be grateful if you could share it.  I am a
> beginner with Sieve and not sure where to start.  Also, pointer toward
> information about the X-UIDL and Status header will be welcome as I need
> to understand what these mean and their implication.
> 
> Third and last resort plan is to run both Cyrus imapd and an imap daemon
> that read mbox file (most likely UW-imapd) and programatically copy the
> messages from the old mailstore to Cyrus.  I wish to avoid that path as
> it is the one that require the most work from my part and I feel will
> probably be quite slow due to protocol overhead and so on.
> 
> Any comments ?  I know mbox to Cyrus migration is a FAQ on the list, but
> I never paid attention to these discussion and searching the archive
> prove quite tedious and donèt yeld clear answer so far.
> 
> Thanks for your insight.
> 


-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
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