Migration to Dovecot
====================

This page contains generic information related to migrating from another IMAP
or POP3 server to Dovecot. You should read this page, and then look at the
server-specific instructions:

 * <UW-IMAP / UW-POP3> [Migration.UW.txt]
 * <Linuxconf / VIMAP> [Migration.Linuxconf.txt]
 * <Courier IMAP and POP3> [Migration.Courier.txt]
 * <Cyrus IMAP and POP3> [Migration.Cyrus.txt]

Dovecot is one of the easiest IMAP servers to migrate to because of its
powerful configuration options. Dovecot can store email in both<mbox>
[MailboxFormat.mbox.txt] and <Maildir> [MailboxFormat.Maildir.txt] formats,
making it compatible with many existing servers. Dovecot is also very flexible
as to where it stores the email. It supports many different databases for
storing<passwords> [PasswordDatabase.txt] <user information>
[UserDatabase.txt].

Migration involves several separate tasks. You either need to convert your data
or make Dovecot read your existing data. Dovecot is very good at being
compatible and configurable, so it is likely to read your existing mailboxes
and user and password configurations. Tasks for conversion include:

 * <Where and how to store the email> [MailLocation.txt]
 * <User authentication> [PasswordDatabase.txt]
 * <User database configuration> [UserDatabase.txt] (home directory structure,
   UID and GID)

IMAP migration
--------------

When migrating mails from another IMAP server, you should make sure that these
are preserved:

 1. Message flags
     * Lost flags can be really annoying, you most likely want to avoid it.
 2. Message UIDs and UIDVALIDITY value
     * If UIDs are lost, at the minimum clients' message cache gets cleaned and
       messages are re-downloaded as new.
     * Some IMAP clients store metadata by assigning it to specific UID, if
       UIDs are changed these will be lost.
 3. Mailbox subscription list
     * Users would be able to manually subscribe them again if you don't want
       to mess with it.

POP3 migration
--------------

When migrating mails from another POP3 server, you should try to preserve the
old UIDLs. If POP3 client is configured to keep mails in the server and the
messages' UIDLs change, all the messages are downloaded again as new messages.

Some servers (UW, Cyrus) implementing both IMAP and POP3 protocols use the IMAP
UID and UIDVALIDITY values for generating the POP3 UIDL values. To preserve the
POP3 UIDL from such servers you'll need to preserve the IMAP UIDs and set
'pop3_uidl_format' properly.

If the server doesn't use IMAP UIDs for the POP3 UIDL, you'll need to figure
out another way to do it. One way is to put the UIDL value into X-UIDL: header
in the mails and set 'pop3_reuse_xuidl=yes'. Some POP3 servers (QPopper) write
the X-UIDL: header themselves, making the migration easy.

Some POP3 servers using Maildir uses the maildir base filename as the UIDL. You
can use 'pop3_uidl_format = %f' to do this.

Here is a list of POP3 servers and how they generate their UIDs. Please update
if you know more:

 * UW-POP3: 'pop3_uidl_format = %08Xv%08Xu'
 * Cyrus <= 2.1.3: 'pop3_uidl_format = %u'
 * Cyrus <= 2.1.4: 'pop3_uidl_format = %v.%u'
 * Dovecot 0.99: 'pop3_uidl_format = %v.%u'
 * tpop3d [http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/tpop3d/]:
    * Maildir: 'pop3_uidl_format = %Mf' (MD5 sum of the maildir base filename
      in hex)
    * mbox: MD5 sum in hex of first 512 bytes of the message (or of the full
      message if it's less than 512 bytes).
 * popa3d [http://www.openwall.com/popa3d/] Generates MD5 sum from a couple of
   headers. Dovecot uses compatible MD5 sums internally, but converts them into
   UIDL strings in a bit different way.

IMAP <-> IMAP copying
---------------------

If you don't care about preserving messages' UIDs, or if there isn't a simple
way to preserve them, you can always migrate from another IMAP server to
Dovecot by downloading the messages via IMAP from the old server and then
uploading them to Dovecot via IMAP.

There are several different tools for this, for example UW-IMAP
[http://www.washington.edu/imap/]'s mailutil and imapsync
[http://freshmeat.net/projects/imapsync].

imapsync
--------

Here's an example of how to run imapsync for a single user:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
imapsync --syncinternaldates \
  --host1 192.168.1.57 --authmech1 LOGIN --user1 leah@example.com --password1
secret \
  --host2 127.0.0.1    --authmech2 LOGIN --user2 leah@example.com --password2
secret
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is quite easy to script this for a number of users, assuming you have their
passwords. Even if you do not, imapsync also supports logging in as an admin
user that has the ability to copy message for sub users, and a variety of other
authentication options.

(This file was created from the wiki on 2007-04-13 14:32)
