Can i convert qpopper to cyrus?

[Michael D. Sofka]

On Tuesday 04 November 2008 04:25:49 am ml at bortal.de wrote:
> Hello List,
>
> can i convert qpopper to cyrus somehow?

I assume you mean:  you are running a qpopper server, and wish to migrate the 
contents of the POP3 mboxes to Cyrus IMAP.

Sure, you can do it.  The O'Reilly "Managing IMAP" book, while dated, has a 
section on converting from Berkeley mbox to Cyrus.  There are some tools 
available, but they are primitive.  The amount to:

	1) Parse the qpopper mbox files into messages
	2) Put those messages into Cyrus.

State 2 has two options:  Talk IMAP to Cyrus. Or, put individual files on
Cyrus and run reconstruct.   When we converted I choose option 3: write my 
own.  This was a perl program which ran on the qpopper server, and talked 
Cyrus.  It used Mail::Util and Mail::Header to parse mbox, and IMAP::Client 
to talk Cyrus.

I looked over this program, and it is too specialized to our needs.  We had a 
split domain:  Webmail kept email on the IMAP server, but new email came to 
the qpopper server.  The Webmail client was modified to look for new email on 
qpopper, as well as IMAP.  Yes, this is odd, but the idea was to smooth the 
transition as new students arrived, and accounts turned over.

The final step was to migrate the remaining qpopper users, and we choose to 
move only the unread messages to IMAP, then switch (via a Cisco redirector) 
the POP3 port to the Cyrus server.   So, the program was moving only unread 
email, and only for a subset of the population.  In the process it also moved 
email out of the Cyrus INBOX into a subfolder, so that newly switched users 
would not download any, potentially very old, ``Webmail'' email to their POP3 
clients (a difficult to reverse process). 


So, short answer---yes, it's easy, there are some simple scripts out there to 
help, but you might find yourself better off writing something using Perl or 
your favorite interpreted language with a good IMAP client, depending on the 
specifics of your site.

Mike

-- 
Michael D. Sofka               sofkam at rpi.edu
C&MT Sr. Systems Programmer,   Email, TeX, Epistemology
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.  http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/