Re: Importing an mbox into Imap

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Tim wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-05-24 at 23:49 -0700, Nataraj wrote:
>   
>> If it's your own mail server and your running an imap server like 
>> dovecot which uses maildir format, then just use the dovecot script to
>> convert your mbox file directly into the file space of the imap
>> server.
>>     
>
> I am, though don't know the script your referring to.  I should probably
> have a look at a newer CentOS install, in case it has something that the
> older one doesn't.
>
>   
>> You may have to build the indexes after the files are moved.
>>     
>
> Hmm, the sort of thing I was hoping to avoid.  If I used a mail client
> to move the mail, it'd move the messages in a manner that was directly
> usable, straight away.  Rather than play games directly with the files.
>   
>> Another option is to use a local mail client to split the file into 
>> several smaller folders before trying to move it into imap.
>>     
>
> Might give that a go, but I suspect that's still going to be a lot of
> time-consuming work.  Likewise for taking the first 10,000 lines of text
> from a spool, chopping into two files between message sections, and
> proceeding that way.
>
>   
I would check out the following links and other documentation in the 
dovecot wiki:
http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/MailFormat
http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat

My understanding is that the differences in performance between the 
various formats that use single files has to do with the indexing.  This 
tends to be implementation dependant as much as format related.

Though many people consider MH as obsolete, I would consider it as an 
intermediate format.  It will read the maildir file and split it into 
it's own MH format which uses single files.  Even though it can be slow, 
the nice thing about mh is that it is all command line based and it's 
easy to write shell scripts, to move and sort messages.  Also it tends 
not to crash.  Evolution does read mh format (thunderbird does NOT), and 
I have used it to move 200mb  mh folders into a dovecot server using 
maildir.  I think the key here is to split into smaller folders (maybe 
even less than 200), even if you put it back into one at the end, that 
way your less likely to get bitten by evolution crashing 3/4 of the way 
through.  If you get it into 4 folders in dovecot, I believe you can 
just rename (mv) the files directly on the server (I think the file 
names are unique) into one folder and reindex the folder.

Also, the UW imap server reads mh format, but I have never used it and 
have no idea what its performance is like.

Nataraj

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