archive cyrus mailboxes to .mbox

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 15:30, Bettina Hafter wrote:
> our clients have huge mailboxes with huge folders and
> 10000 of mails. so I want them to archive their mails.
> 
> As I don't know every mailclient, I would like to offer
> them that I archive their mails directly under
> /var/spool/imap/user>. 

I'm not sure I understand. If you're going to archive to MBOX, you
should probably store the MBOX files somewhere else - perhaps in their
home directories, available by scp. It's probably best not to store
files in /var/imap or /var/spool/imap, except those files created and
used by Cyrus.

What do you gain from storing mbox files that you can't achieve by
moving older mail into a user.$username.archive mailbox? All I can think
of is that it allows you to move the archived MBOX files out of the
cyrus mail system to free up some space.

If you in fact want to automatically move older messages to an archival
mailbox, still within the Cyrus system, you can do that. Some perl tools
were recently discussed that allow you to write simple perl programs to
perform tasks over IMAP - you could probably write one that moved all
mailboxes older than $DATE to an archive mailbox.
 
> I was googeling around, but could not find anything
> (tools or similar) to convert cyrus-mailboxes into .mbox
> or .txt or similar (the other way around I could find).

Use mailutil from the UW-IMAPd project. It's great, and does exactly
what you need - if I understand what you want to do properly. It can
also import MBOX files into an IMAP server, copy between two IMAP
mailboxes, etc. 

Craig Ringer