Re: [exim] Migrating from qmail to exim question

On 14 May 2012, at 19:59, Miguel Lanz wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> 1st of all thanks for taking the time to read and reply to my inquiry here.
>
> I am very in-experienced when it comes to mail server administration,
> however I was assigned a task to migrate an existing qmail server running
> on a ubuntu 8.0 server to a new opensource mail server that will be
> install and setup on a fresh redhat enterprise version 6 server.
>
> doing a bit of research I came across exim and it seems a really good MTA
> choice for our purpose specially being open source. ( we can't afford to
> have any commercial products )
>
> Is there any good documentation out there that can help me, guide me
> through migrating 300 mail boxes from qmail server to exim serve

There's no mailbox migration to be performed, except to copy the email to the new machine. Exim is responsible for two things:

1. Accepting inbound email, and putting it into the right courier-imap mailbox.

2. Accepting authenticated email submissions from your users' mail clients, and delivering them either locally or to third parties.

Courier-imap stores the emails, and serves them up to users when they log in with their mail clients. You don't need to change this, or move any emails.

Exim can use openldap for authentication.

What you call your "qmail server" is actually a ubuntu server. Qmail is a process that runs on that server, alongside courier and openldap. You simply want to replace Qmail with Exim.

> our
> current qmail server uses the Maildir format and we would like to keep the
> new one that way, also runs courier-imap for IMAP on ports 143 & 993, we
> don't use POP3, and all users in qmail server authenticate to their e-mail
> accounts through an openldap server that is hosted on the qmail server as
> well. Our current qmail server does not have any aliases setup nor virtual
> domains.
>
> One option I was looking at for IMAP service on the new server is dovecot.

That might require mailbox migration. It might also then require reconfiguration of Exim. It's probably better to do this as a separate process.

> I would like to test this procedure on a VM that I have setup but am
> planning on deploying to a production environment in the next 2 weeks.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciate it.



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Ian Eiloart
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