Author: Barry Pederson Date: To: exim-users Subject: Re: [Exim] Replacing Netscape Messaging w/ Exim and mailbox
formatquestions
Todd Jagger wrote: >
> Hello,
>
> I am in the position of migrating our company's mail server from
> Netscape Messaging Server to Exim. And I'm very glad to be doing
> so. :-) No prob in switching out the MTA and the user accounts, but
> I'm befuddled with trying to deal with the existing mailboxes for the
> accounts so the users don't lose all their mail, and their imap
> accounts still work.
>
> NMS uses some sort of maildir format by creating mailboxes in
> /var/spool/mailbox/${local_part}/inbox. Within the mailboxes each
> message is a separate file. IMAP users can create mailboxes anywhere
> within the main $local_part directory. The mailboxes are not owned by
> the user but by the mta user account and nobody as the group. I'm
> having a hard time getting Exim to duplicate this behavior, and maybe
> it can't, I dunno. Maybe that's a less than desirable configuration in
> the first place and it would be better to do something else while I'm
> under the hood.
>
> Has anyone done a migration from Messaging Server to Exim that could
> give me some pointers for transition?
>
> IF it's not possible to preserve the existing mailbox structure for the
> users and I have to choose a different format; which would be the best
> choice for general pop and imap serving of a couple thousand mail
> accounts? I realize this is almost like asking unix vs. nt or some
> other subjective holy war. I read with much interest last month's
> thread "Washington mbx again". And I understand all have their
> strengths and weaknesses. I'd just like to make a good decision for
> performance and ease of use and maintenance. Philip and others, what
> do you like and why?
I've got Netscape Messaging too (although on Windows NT), and it looks like
Netscape has it's own unique mailbox format - so if you switch to some other
POP/IMAP server, you're probably going to have to bite the bullet and somehow
the convert the mailboxes to the format your new POP/IMAP software (whatever
you end up choosing) prefers.
So far I'm just using Exim as a front-end for Netscape's SMTP, so Exim does
most of the SMTP work (including looking up forwarding addresses and such), so
only if it's really local does it get sent to Netscape's SMTP, which delivers
it to the Netscape-style mailboxes.
In the NT version of NMS, it looks like each message is a separate text file,
but with a 256-byte binary header, probably containg the flags for read,
replied, etc. Anyone know the details of that header? I suppose it might be
possible to write a translator that used the IMAP protocol, and opened up the
an account on both the old NMS server and a new server, and copied the
messages between them, maintaining any flags.
