Home Grown Email -> Zimbra

[dbo]

Let me start by saying I'm in unfamiliar territory right now. I'm the Webmaster at a college and suggested we move to Zimbra for email. We had a test environment up and running and were pretty pleased when our home grown email server went down. I'm now being requested to turn our test environment into a live environment. Not only is it a little out of my area, but it's certainly not the most ideal way to roll this into production.

All that aside, we have no documentation on the current email server. All I know is that it stores the messages in /var/spool/mail I'm hoping that there is a way we can import all emails from this system to our new Zimbra install, but I'm really not even sure where to get started. Can someone help get me in the right direction?

[jfha73]

What a coincidence, I have exactly the same issue, only this is for a secondary school, so I will also appreciate it if we can get some help.

Thanks in advance,

[Baylink]

Did your old-skool mail system have an IMAP server pointed at it's mailboxes, and can you get that running?

[dbo]

I don't believe so, I think it's only POP3 access. I specifically recall our Network Administrator mentioning he wished it was IMAP isntead.

[Baylink]

Alas.

There's an mbox to IMAP script on the wiki, written in Python, which you might be able to use to inject your old mail into your new mailboxes, though you're likely going to have to build a fair bit of scaffolding around it to use it in large-scale production, as I infer you'll need to.

IMAP on the Zimbra side, of course.

[jfha73]

Well our server has IMAP installed, but it conflicts with Zimbra (Port 143) so it's stopped, I think the best way would be grabing the mail files (if I'm not mistaken they have each user's name) and import them (somehow) into Zimbra.

Am I right dbo?

[mraaronm]

In a few hours I'm going to do a full migration using pop2imap, which is mentioned on the wiki.

It's worked very well in my tests migrating from an existing server via pop3 to Zimbra via imap.

[dbo]

That's the hope. I actually wondered if there was a way to parse these files and forward them back to the original recipient. This would ensure that emails & all attachments were imported.

Do you have a link to the python script?

[Baylink]

No, Zimbra has it's own IMAP. And the script I mentioned is on the page that mrraaronm linked.

[dbo]

I somehow missed mrraaronm's post completely. This link looks like a huge help. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. The Perl script is probably the route I'll go as I have far more Perl experience than Python.