Moving users between servers

[Paul Dekkers]

Rob Tanner wrote:

>I am going to be moving some 5,000 users from an old ESYS imap server to CMU.
>It is my understanding from a previous query, that the cyradm "xfermailbox"
>command only works between CMU servers and, therefore, it won't help me here.
>
>I already discovered that simply copying the files at the UNIX level and
>updating the mailboxes database still leaves many holes that need to be fixed
>-- many of the mailboxes won't reconstruct properly without massaging.  
>
>Therefore, does anyone have code that I can use to cleanly move users from
>one server to another via the IMAP protocol?
>  
>
We're also moving from simeon to cyrus right now: but for about 50 users 
(about 100 Gb of mail). Our best experience is at this moment with 
imapsync. We experienced some problems with large mailboxes though, but 
that might be perl-IMAPClient and FreeBSD related: the client complained 
that there was not enough memory left and we had to restart imapsync again.

We also tried mailsync - that works (it has the advantage that you can 
prompt for a users's password, but I suppose in your case that is not an 
advantage) but it (the version in the FreeBSD ports at least) does not 
work well with special flags: read flags are ok, but none of Mozilla's 
flags where synced for instance. With imapsync we still had to run it 
twice sometimes to have all flags synced ok, although the README states 
otherwise.

We're migrating user per user (that's doable with 50 users). Users 
connect to a perdition proxy that decide what IMAP server to use. The 
sendmail and postfix mailers have tables where the user really is.

Migrating a user from our old Sun with simeon takes now about 1Gb per 
hour, so that's something you really should take into account. It seems 
that running imapsync from Linux instead of FreeBSD increases this a 
bit, maybe up to 1.5Gb per hour. Strange, but it has probably to do with 
the broken p5-IMAPClient.

Paul

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