Migrating from UW imap to Cyrus

[Andrew Morgan]

For the sake of completeness:

http://acs-wiki.andrew.cmu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Cyrus/MboxCyrusMigration

Those are the notes and scripts I used/wrote to migrate 35,000 mailboxes
(including non-INBOX mailboxes, somewhat successfully) to Cyrus.  The
process took about 10 hours for 80GB of mail.

I looked at using mailutil, but I figured it would be too slow for the
volume of mail involved and the downtime we had available.

	Andy

On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Sebastian Hagedorn wrote:

> Hi,
>
> > I'm in the process of moving from UW imap to Cyrus Imap.  Somewhere in
> > my reading up on the compile/install/configure process I could have
> > sworn that I saw something about some scripts that can be used to
> > transfer my existing mbox mail folders into Cyrus.  Unfortuantely, now
> > that I'm actually ready for that step, I don't seem to be able to find
> > either the scripts or the reference to it.  Anybody have any idea what
> > I'm talking about?
>
> we just did a migration of 30,000 users this past weekend. Our approach was
> not to try to do it perfect, but only "good enough". All we did
> automatically was to copy the users' inboxes, not their personal
> mailfolders. We give them tools to do that themselves. The main reason for
> that decision was that it's near impossible to tell *where* users have
> their folders. With UW imapd the home directory is the root of the tree.
> Many users have "Mail" or "mail" as their mail folders, but essentially
> it's just a guess. We knew, however, that all students had their INBOX in
> their AFS home directories.
>
> We also decided not to use mailutil, but to do it the dirty way. The reason
> for that was that we thought using mailutil would take too long.
>
> So here's what we did (all the users and INBOXes had been created in
> advance):
>
> - we mounted a AFS2NFS translator partition containing the home directories
> (the new server doesn't use AFS)
>
> - we then ran an overhauled version of inboxfer, a Perl script that uses
> formail to split mboxes in separate mail files
>
> - finally we ran reconstruct on the folders and did a "quota -f"
>
> That's it. It took about 9 hours for the 30,000 users with roughly 40 GB of
> mail. I can provide the scripts if there's interest.
>
> Cheers, Sebastian Hagedorn
> --
> Sebastian Hagedorn M.A. - RZKR-R1 (Gebäude 52), Zimmer 18
> Zentrum für angewandte Informatik - Universitätsweiter Service RRZK
> Universität zu Köln / Cologne University - Tel. +49-221-478-5587