Recently i had to migrate some mailboxes from one imap server to the other. After a bit of research into tools for imap migration running on Linux i decided to use imapsync. It has all the relevant features and is maintained. Running it showed that it tries to do the right things by default. As i will have to do such a migration in the future i document my setup.
Installation
imapsync is a great tool but somehow doesn’t come with perlbrew preparation.
imapsync has a lot of dependencies (mostly perl libs) which are installed via the system’s package manager. But sometimes you just want to execute a migration and not have all those libs on the system afterwards. So a Docker setup setup is provided which solves this easily. But Perl has its established solution for this problem, so we want to use this: perlbrew.
So i prepared a cpanfile which will hopefully be included in the future.
requires 'App::cpanminus';
requires 'Authen::NTLM';
requires 'CGI';
requires 'Compress::Zlib';
requires 'Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA';
requires 'Data::Dumper';
requires 'Data::Uniqid';
requires 'Digest::HMAC';
requires 'Digest::HMAC_MD5';
requires 'Digest::MD5';
requires 'Dist::CheckConflicts';
requires 'Encode';
requires 'Encode::Byte';
requires 'Encode::IMAPUTF7';
requires 'File::Copy::Recursive';
requires 'File::Tail';
requires 'IO::Socket::INET';
requires 'IO::Socket::INET6';
requires 'IO::Socket::SSL';
requires 'IO::Tee';
requires 'JSON';
requires 'JSON::WebToken';
requires 'JSON::WebToken::Crypt::RSA';
requires 'HTML::Entities';
requires 'LWP::UserAgent';
requires 'Mail::IMAPClient';
requires 'MIME::Base64';
requires 'Module::Implementation';
requires 'Module::Runtime';
requires 'Module::ScanDeps';
requires 'Net::SSLeay';
requires 'Package::Stash';
requires 'Package::Stash::XS';
requires 'PAR::Packer';
requires 'Parse::RecDescent';
requires 'Pod::Usage';
requires 'Readonly';
requires 'Regexp::Common';
requires 'Sys::MemInfo';
requires 'Term::ReadKey';
requires 'Test::Fatal';
requires 'Test::Mock::Guard';
requires 'Test::MockObject';
requires 'Test::More';
requires 'Test::Pod';
requires 'Test::Requires';
requires 'Test::Deep';
requires 'Text::ParseWords';
requires 'Try::Tiny';
requires 'Unicode::String';
requires 'URI::Escape';Just save as cpanfile and run cpanm --installdeps .
Running
There a good examples for testing the migration of single mailboxes (https://imapsync.lamiral.info/examples/imapsync_example.sh) and doing it in bulk (https://imapsync.lamiral.info/examples/sync_loop_unix.sh). From there you can craft your own scripts.
Don’t forget to test your new mail setup using https://www.mail-tester.com/ 😉