How to migrate emails to a secondary imap server preserving folder structure

Question

The subject line could also read: "how to setup an email archiving system that preserves folder structure and tags".

I am reaching the quota of my main email provider (imap1) and I would like to regularly move/migrate some emails to another imap server (imap2) that provides more space.

However it took a lot of time to organize my emails into folders and labels in imap1, and I would like to preserve the folder structure after migration to imap2, so that I can easily locate emails in the archive server imap2.

I found no easy way to do this with modern email clients in MacOS X (Apple Mail, PostBox, Thunderbird, Outlook, ...). The windows version of Microsoft Outlook used to have that feature when archiving to an external PST file, but the mac version of Outlook does not seem to support neither PST files nor archiving.

Any ideas would be welcome.

Best regards,

AA

Answer 1

I think this is a common issue. The solution I've used is to add a pop account as well as the imap, setting the pop to keep 6 months/1 year of files in server. After that time it downloads them from the server and keeps them in this account. You can also create a rule to mark messages in pop account as read as to not get overloaded with unread messages

Of course this has limits if you are aware from your PC but depending on your needs may suffice.