[clug] Converting mailboxes to IMAP

[Michael Still]

Burn Alting wrote:

> One of the differences is that, rather than the simple pop3 mail system
> I served my family's Windoze boxes with, Fedora only provides pop3 via
> the Cyrus IMAP mail system.

mboxes (to which you refer) are the r0x0r. I'm now using dovecot with 
mboxes as my imap server, and it's really nice. You might want to check 
the dovecot website / fedora for a package.

> I've worked out how to create the mail accounts under Cyrus IMAP and
> feed the IMAP mailboxes via postfix, but my problem is that I have a few
> mailboxes in the old format living in /var/spool/mail.
> 
> There must be a 'conversion' tool but I can't find any documentation for
> one. I can always re-forward the mail to my users (everyone else at home
> who only use Windoze to read their mail), but surely there must be a
> command like

Not that I'm aware of... Basically you want to convert mbox to maildir. 
There are perl scripts, but they're scary. You're probably best of doing 
something like running dovecot on a laptop which you mboxes, and then 
using offlineimap (which is quite nice too) to copy the mail to your 
courier server.

While I'm at it, my offline email reading on my laptop has me really 
happy at the moment. I run dovecot on a server at home, and on the 
laptop. I use offlineimap to sync the mail between them (I've been using 
it for a couple of weeks, and it just works). I have exim configured to 
use one of my servers at home as a smarthost, and that has the side 
effect that _all_ of my mail tools just work (SMTP server is localhost), 
and when I connect runq forwards all the mail upline.

Cheers,
Mikal