I finally got everything working with this howto. I'm so happy. I just have to make this server public and remove the old email server. I want to migrate the email data to the new server before I do this. The old server has mail stored as ISO-8859 mail text, with very long lines. 1.Can I just put this data in the vmail folders or will I have to convert it? 2. Does the data go into /home/vmail/mydomain.com/myuser/new ?
Should work, assuming both origin and destination store mail as individual files. email is a transport medium for all different kinds of character encodings. In RFC (2)821/822 is standarized that email is transported as 7-bits. If you have any other character encoding (such as UTF8 or binary), it should be binhexed, base64'ed or whatever. So.. did you try it yet? And? Did it work? Paul
Yes, I tried it. It did not work. Here is the problem. My old mailserver has several files in /var/mail. One file for each email account. Each of those files grows as the accounts get new emails and shrink to )KB when the emails are read. There is also one file called 'mail' which is about 6M in size. From reading I divine that is the mbox format. The new server is using Maildir format. I guess I will need to convert the files in /var/mail to mbox format.
For converting to maildir I tried the suggestion listed here: http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3 That allowed me to convert one user to maildir format. Unfortunately my other users don't have an mbox file in their home directories. God knows how or where they are storing mail. Fortunately these are just my personal email accounts and only the one that had the mbox file really gets much use. So everything looks good for my transition now.
