Kevin,
I've never used Kmail, but a quick Google suggests it uses either mbox
or Maildir for file storage.
Maildir is preferable to mbox because with mbox, you have to lock the
whole folder and it doesn't scale very well. However, since Maildir has
1 file per message, indexing the folder can be slow and kill a server if
there's a lot of mail on it. Also, with mbox, you traditionally can't
have subfolders. Though I don't know if that's a restriction in mbox or
the daemon.
Dovecot is grand for a small scale operation. Medium, have a look at
Courier but that suffers from the Maildir indexing problem. One of the
lads was talking to the operator of a large mail server and says that
Cyrus is the best for this. However it uses it's own filestore format.
Back to the copying issue - if I read correctly and Kmail uses Maildir
for storage, then it should be a matter of just copying the folder from
the shell, rather than within the client. If it's mbox, you can get
Kmail to save it in a Maildir format and copy or use the mbox2maildir
util (mb2md in Debian apt anyway). Otherwise, if Kmail does storage
locally in mbox, you could use the mb2md to migrate them.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Cian
Kevin Philp wrote:
> I have a small office where people have been using Kmail for the last five
> years. They are well organised and have all sorted their years of email into
> directories/sub directories and have happily accumulated thousands of emails.
>> Now we want to offer them access to their mail while travelling so I want to
> migrate to Dovecot so they can access their mail via imap. I can copy email
> from local files to imap in Kmail but it won't copy directories. Also I
> looked at the Kmail directory setup and it doesn't lend itself to worknig
> with Dovecot.
>> can someone point me in the direction of a wee perl script or similar that
> will run through each users Kmail directories and copy them to something hat
> is easier for Dovecot to understand?
>> Thanks
>> Kevin.
>
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