On Fri, 2004-02-13 at 21:59, Andrew J Caird wrote:
One keyword that should find at least one message in the thread to get you started is "mailutil".
While I agree with the above suggestion (read the archives, consider using mailutil), I thought it'd be interesting to see if direct import was possible. Cyrus uses a custom mailbox format (one file per message like maildir, but otherwise unrelated to anything else AFAIK), so you can't just copy over mailboxes directly. I thought I'd see how hard it was to do so, though I question the utility and sensibility of doing so for anything but testing.
It appears to be possible to import maildirs by renaming all messages to the cyrus-style 'n.' format, moving the directory into the desired location and fixing it's permissions. `reconstruct -r -f` didn't seem to want to find the mailbox, but using cyradm to 'cm' the path then reconstructing the mailbox seemed to work.
To do the renaming, this works:
#!/usr/bin/env python import os,sys
msglist = os.listdir(sys.argv[1])
for (mdid, uid) in map( lambda x,y:(x,y), msglist, range(1,
len(msglist)+1 )):
print "%s -> %s." % (mdid, uid)
os.rename( mdid, "%s." % uid )
then just: root# mv $maildir $cyrus_partition/$target_mailbox root# chown -R cyrus.mail $cyrus_partition/$target_mailbox cyrus$ [ using cyradm, 'add' the mailbox ] cyrus$ reconstruct -r -f $parent_of_target_mailbox
I don't know if it's correct, it's definitely ugly, and it's probably a
really bad idea to do. It did, however, appear to work.
So - a question to those who know about the innards of the Cyrus mailbox handling: is it reasonable to import maildirs directly as a migration option?
Its probably reasonable, but you have to make sure that no messages are delivered to this new mailbox before you're done reconstructing.
> Can significant problems be expected? Is it likely to be much
faster to copy directly rather than use IMAP?
If the messages are already on the server then its probably faster to just rename them.
What about read status (the ,2BLAH suffix in maildir)?
Can't help you there. If you want flags preserved, then use IMAP.
Oh, and allow me to repeat: if you use the method I've described above, without confirmation that it's safe, you're insane.
Of course, if you can import maildir you can import mbox pretty easily, too.
How so? You have to split mbox the file into individual messages.
-- Kenneth Murchison Oceana Matrix Ltd. Software Engineer 21 Princeton Place 716-662-8973 x26 Orchard Park, NY 14127 --PGP Public Key-- http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp --- Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
