Re: moving mail to imap
I'm just switching to IMAP, so I'll toss in a few observations.
I decided to try Cyrus, mostly because it seemed mention more often
than others on the exim lists, and it was mentioned as integrating
very easily with exim. I've found that to be the case.
Also, while reading imap mailing lists trying to make a decision, I
saw enough to convince me the author of Courier had poor judgement (as
evidenced by his own postings). While this need not mean the program
is poor (in fact, lots of people seem to like it), it was enough to
make me look elsewhere. Mostly he argued with the UW-IMAP author, who
is also the author of the IMAP standard. There also seem to be a lot
of statements of the form x is better than y (referring either to
servers or mailbox formats), and some of these even have evidence. But
overall, my impression was they all performed about the same. More
accurately, performance varied according to your local system
characteristics.
Cyrus supports hierarchical folders, with several options (i.e., do
they all need to go under INBOX? use "." or "/" as separator?).
I found the documentation on Cyrus rather poor, and this was the main
obstacle to installation. However, I've worked with the maintainers
to improve that (they were quite open to this), so it may be a bit
easier if you use the cvs documentation (which will get packaged in
due course).
I also have old local mail I'd like to migrate, and have heard that I
must manually create the folders before dragging the contents over
(this is with evolution). Somewhere someone must have written some
scripts to do this, but for me it's not worth the effort to hunt them
down. Someone in this thread referred to the IMAP standard as being
an obstacle to creating folders, but I don't think so. You can create
folders in IMAP; the only problem is automating it.
Now that it's set up, I rather like it. I did it mostly so I could
access my mail from several places without worrying about its getting
trashed. (Well, also I was using evolution locally and wanted to use
mutt via dial in).
P.S. Cyrus also supports sieve for server side filtering/directing of
email. This is pretty straightforward, though not as flexible as exim
forward files. With some work, I think the latter could also be used
to direct mail to specific mailboxes; cyrus supports that via a
non-standard extension involving rewriting the user to whom delivery
is made.
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