Transferring Mail to a New Mail Server
by Tony LawrenceAPLawrence.com
Tuesday, 11th October 2005
Sometimes we just have to move on. Your current mail server may just not be meeting your needs, so you've put up something new. But what about old mail? If your servers are identical (Sendmail to Sendmail, etc.) or use the same mailbox storage format, you may be able to just transfer files directly. If not, read on..
If everyone uses POP, there's usually not much to transfer, and if you can shut off incoming mail and just wait long enough for everyone to pop their mail, there won't be anything. But many people now use IMAP
It's actually sometime useful NOT to transfer anything. Many users let their mailboxes build up without ever deleting unneeded messages. If you can leave the old server on the network, they can always access their old mail if they need to, but they (and you) may find after a year or so that nobody ever has. You might then archive the messages "Just in case" and take down the old server.
If you do want to transfer messages, it can be as simple as running command line tools. The first thing to do is to set the old server to forward all mail to the new server. Exactly what you do to accomplish that depends on your server, but it should be easy. For sendmail, you'd set SMART_HOST and MAIL_HUB, or edit the aliases file and forward each user. For SME server, set the "Delegate Mail Server" in the Server Manager.
Transferring existing mail depends on the format it now uses. For example, Qmail stores messages in individual files. On an SME server (which uses Qmail) you could transfer "tony"'s current mail with just this:
for i in *
do
cat $i | /var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject
done
use Mail::Mailer;
@stuff=<>;
foreach (@stuff) {
$from=$_ if /^From:/;
$to=$_ if /^To:/;
$subject=$_ if /^Subject:/;
last if $subject;
}
$from=~ s/From: //;
$from=~ s/<//;
$from=~ s/>//;
$to=~ s/To: //;
$to=~ s/<//;
$to=~ s/>//;
$subject=~ s/^/*** FILE ME IN CUSTS ***/;
$mailer=Mail::Mailer->new();
$mailer->open({From =>$from,
To => $to,
Subject => $subject,
}) or die "Can't open $!\n";
foreach (@stuff) {
print $mailer $_;
}
$mailer=>close();
If your mail is stored in Unix mailbox fashion, you need something to read the messages and break them up. While you could read the mailboxes directly, it's more portable to use tools like POP:
use Net::POP3;
$pop=Net::POP3->new('10.1.36.237') or die "$!";
$pop->login("tony","password");
$messages=$pop->list;
foreach $msg(keys %$messages) {
$message=$pop->get($msg);
foreach (@$message) {
#same basic idea as above,
}
}
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