Transferring emails from Courier Mail Server

[Willy92]

Hi All,

I have a client who is moving their email & web hosting over to us. The host they are currently using is using Courier Mail Server. Is there a way to "import" the emails from Courier into Ability? Courier does store it's emails in plain-text format similar to Ability (We are currently using version 2.72 enterprise). The filenames are stored in a different format without extension, for example the one emails filename is "1363721907.H184648P3367.hostnameOfServer,S=844-2,S", and the contents of the file...

Code: Select all

Return-path: <senderEmail>
Envelope-to: receivingEmail
Delivery-date: Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:38:27 -0400
Received: from [000.000.000.000] (port=59430 helo=[000.000.000.000])
   by hostname with esmtps (TLSv1:AES128-SHA:128)
   (Exim 4.80)
   (envelope-from <senderEmail>)
   id 1UI2Mc-0000s6-Tj; Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:38:27 -0400
Subject: subjectText
Mime-Version: 1.0 (1.0)
From: SenderName <senderEmail>
Content-Type: text/plain;
   charset=us-ascii
X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (10B146)
Message-Id: <emailHash@emailDomain>
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:08:22 -0230
Cc: "contactName" <contactEmailAddress>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
To: receiver <receiverEmail>

MESSAGE BODY HERE


Above is an example of a plain-text email, obviously the HTML emails are formatted a little differently.

Will it be possible to copy the emails over, or is another solution more feasible...such as using Pop3 Retrievals?

Certainly any input is appreciated, if we can't transfer the emails, using the Pop3 Retrieval is better than telling the client they're S.O.L.

Thanks in advance!

[Code Crafters]

POP3 retrievals is the easiest way to transfer the mails but this will only transfer mails from the Inbox. If you need to transfer other folders you can use IMAP4 with a mail client like outlook to copy the mails from the old account to the new AMS account but don't do more than about 1000 mails at once or outlook tends to hang.

[Willy92]

Outlook is the way we're doing it and for the most part it's working well. We are having one issue, maybe you can shed some light..

There are a number of emails that won't transfer over, you drag them into the Ability Mail Server account and it never uploads it to the server. I've been able to narrow it down to emails that don't have the "intro text" (message preview). For example in Outlook the emails in the left column would have a similar formatting to this:

Sender
Subject Date
First text of the email


The emails that only display the Sender, Subject and Date do not transfer over, and completely halt the transfer of other emails if they're in the "queue". I'm open to any suggestions.

[Code Crafters]

Transferring via IMAP4 will work fine but tends to only like doing less than 1000 emails at once. Large emails may also need to be transferred separately. As for troublesome emails they may not be very well formed which you can view in the text files. Note however, that the example email you sent is a plain text email and could be copied into the Inbox folder physically and AMS should pick it up after a restart and re-login.

[HVGS]

Take a look at imapsync. It is a command line tool that can be easily scripted. We used it for a large transfer between Ability and Office 365.

http://imapsync.lamiral.info/

Regards,
Phil

[Willy92]

Hi Chris, HVGS,

I've tried copying the emails into the inbox folder in the user's directory and I get nothing, even with a full restart of Ability Mail Server. I've tried renaming them to something else, making sure they have the text file extension, etc. No go.

It looked like POP3 Retrievals was my only option for problem emails until Phil replied...my only issue with the POP3 retrievals is that it doesn't retrieve the date, everything that comes in has today's date, and I have a client with 20k emails in her inbox since 2011 (She's GM of a major company), so having them all reset to today probably wouldn't be a fun conversation

I'll take a look at imapsync...looks like it'll work, we've been getting more of these "transfers" recently so it would certainly be worth the small investment....especially with the scripting support. I'll probably have bought it by the time you reply and have the answers from my own experience but how did you find it's performance, did it transfer the mails at an acceptable rate?

Thanks for your assistance so far in this!

[Willy92]

Imapsync did the job. Took over 24 hours to transfer all 20k emails but it did it with virtually no hiccups. Definitely worth the investment, will make future transfers a lot easier, it's fast and you can setup batch jobs (multiple accounts).

Thanks again to both of you