Copying dovecot maildir to another server with courier maildir

Question

i just moved all my mailboxes first from one server to the new one by using rsync. After that i created the folders using Thunderbird to have same folder structure like on old server.

Then i copied all mail files into the folders.

Now when i subscribe and click on the folder in Thunderbird it starts downloading the headers of all mails, but after finishing download nothing appears in the mail list. Its like my folder is empty and everytime i click again on the folder thunderbird starts again downloading headers.

What is wrong here?

I found a solution using a tool called imapsync, but its not for free, so i started doing it by copy&paste. I thought Thunderbird will be able to fix the indexes. :-(

Or is there a better solution to migrate from dovecot maildir to courier maildir?

Answer 1

There are some free imapsync repositories, for example @github "imapsync/imapsync" (but it seems to have "issues"). I also found https://code.google.com/p/imapcopy/

I haven't used either but if I understood their workings correctly they'd communicate with both servers, so that these would be doing their own housekeeping.

What you missed I could only find the other way round: Courier - to - Dovecot http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Migration/Courier

As you can see at the bottom, some files are considered compatible, but at least their names are different. You might be in luck and it really is only the UIDL:

Courier's courierimapuiddb file is compatible with Dovecot's dovecot-uidlist file, just rename it.