mbox to maildir migration

Submitted by epimedia on Sun, 11/01/2009 - 18:50

Hello, I was migrating servers over the weekend. The old server had an old copy of Virtualmin/Dovecot on it. The exports of the servers didn't capture the inboxes at /var/spool/mail. I am unsure why. [BTW the mboxes at ~/mail did get transferred]

Anyway, that server has been turned off and deleted now. I was able to get a copy of the /var/spool/mail for each user transferred. Realising what had happened I made a copy of the mbox at /.var/spool/mail and transferred it to the new server. I then used mb2md to convert the mbox files to Maildir.

Here comes the question: The script worked, but it did not respect the subfolders under the inbox, it just sort of mashed them all together. Does VM Pro have any special functions I can accesss (CLI or otherwise) to convert this mbox to the user's maildir while respecting the folder hierarchy that formerly appeared under inbox?

Eric

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Submitted by JamieCameron on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 18:03

I'm a little confused , as mbox-format inboxes don't really have a concept of sub-folders.

How were these sub-folders stored originally exactly?

Submitted by epimedia on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 04:31

BTW this may be a non-issue now as I have placated the client and will never use mbox again. However, if you are interested in it academically:

Inbox was at /var/spool/mail, folders at ~/mail

The lost folders of which I spoke were somehow nested in the Inbox file. Apparently you can do this. The mbox file has separators in it.

The emails are still there, just not organized into the folders after I converted to Maildir, which makes sense if the conversion utility I used did not respect the separators.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 12:39

Wow, I've never seen those separators before .. what mail server were you using previously?

I'd be interested to see a sample mbox file like this if you have one.

Submitted by epimedia on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 16:01

It was Dovecot, but from the research I have been doing the MUA is what allows this to happen - not necessarily the server. Will get back to you when I can replicate the behavior.

Submitted by epimedia on Fri, 11/06/2009 - 16:18

Forget it. I cannot replicate this this problem. It is to due with the email client anyway.