Archiving mail from an Exchange Server into something more "sensible"
I have an "old" Exchange Server (2008), which I'm decommissioning. On it there are several mailboxes which I'd like archived so that I can access them as IMAP folders on another (Linux) machine in future if I need to. We no longer have an internal mail server of any variety to host the mailbox archive (we've moved to Google Apps) so I'll be settings something up specially (probably a virtual machine). The majority of the mailboxes are "general" ones like sales, accounts, etc, and a lot of the others are for people who no longer work for the business, so ideally I'll move the email into one new account with folders for sales/accounts/etc rather than create them as different accounts. Any suggestions as to the best way to do this? There will be several GB of email in total. My main concern is to retain as much information as possible, such as email headers and timestamps. I considered pulling all the email via POP3 into a mail client on my desktop but I'm not confident that I won't end up losing some of that information (timestamps being the main thing: I still want to see when the email "arrived", not have it look like the email arrived at the time I did the POP3 transfer). -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
At Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:23:22 +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
I have an "old" Exchange Server (2008), which I'm decommissioning.
The majority of the mailboxes are "general" ones like sales, accounts, etc, and a lot of the others are for people who no longer work for the business, so ideally I'll move the email into one new account with folders for sales/accounts/etc rather than create them as different accounts.
Any suggestions as to the best way to do this? There will be several GB of email in total.
I use getmail <http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/> to retrieve mail from various accounts into one Maildir tree which is then served up as IMAP using Dovecot. I can imagine being able to use getmail with its -a switch (retrieve all messages) into a fresh Maildir tree to solve this problem. You'd first need to create a tree of Maildir folders on the machine on which you intend to store the messages. You can use maildirmake for this which is available in the Dovecot and Courier packages (and probably from other packages too). You'd then write a getmail configuration for accessing mail from your Exchange server and then run it on the same machine as your new Maildir folders. For this to work, however, your Exchange server would need to speak one of the protocols supported by getmail (such as IMAP) correctly. I believe Exchange servers can be configured to do this, but they are not necessarily so configured.
My main concern is to retain as much information as possible, such as email headers and timestamps.
getmail with Maildir will preserve this kind of information as it retrieves the complete content of the email message. Best, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken@jabber.earth.li http://www.richardlewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Sent from my [insert device/mail client here]
On 29/03/11 11:43, Richard Lewis wrote:
I use getmail<http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/> to retrieve mail from various accounts into one Maildir tree which is then served up as IMAP using Dovecot. [...]
This is reasonably close to my original way of thinking (s/getmail/fetchmail/ because I haven't played with getmail, but fetchmail is horrible so it's time I looked at getmail again!) There seems to be a general consensus that I'm going to end up with a local Maildir mail store which isn't going to play well (directly) with Thunderbird. If I want a lightweight IMAP server to sit between Maildir and TB what's the best one to choose? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:06:15PM +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
There seems to be a general consensus that I'm going to end up with a local Maildir mail store which isn't going to play well (directly) with Thunderbird. If I want a lightweight IMAP server to sit between Maildir and TB what's the best one to choose?
Dovecot is probably a good starting point these days. J. -- Revd. Jonathan McDowell, ULC | What have I become, my sweetest friend?
On 29 Mar 10:23, Mark Rogers wrote:
I have an "old" Exchange Server (2008), which I'm decommissioning.
On it there are several mailboxes which I'd like archived so that I can access them as IMAP folders on another (Linux) machine in future if I need to. We no longer have an internal mail server of any variety to host the mailbox archive (we've moved to Google Apps) so I'll be settings something up specially (probably a virtual machine).
The majority of the mailboxes are "general" ones like sales, accounts, etc, and a lot of the others are for people who no longer work for the business, so ideally I'll move the email into one new account with folders for sales/accounts/etc rather than create them as different accounts.
Any suggestions as to the best way to do this? There will be several GB of email in total.
My main concern is to retain as much information as possible, such as email headers and timestamps. I considered pulling all the email via POP3 into a mail client on my desktop but I'm not confident that I won't end up losing some of that information (timestamps being the main thing: I still want to see when the email "arrived", not have it look like the email arrived at the time I did the POP3 transfer).
Turn on the IMAP server in exchange, grant a user access to all the mailboxes, use offlineimap to download all the mail somewhere else in to a maildir structure, rejoice. -- Brett Parker http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ PGP Fingerprint 1A9E C066 EDEE 6746 36CB BD7F 479E C24F 95C7 1D61
On 29/03/11 11:52, Brett Parker wrote:
Turn on the IMAP server in exchange,
Twas always thus, I've not read mail from a Windows machine in several years so IMAP was enabled as soon as the server went in!
grant a user access to all the mailboxes,
This bit has me a bit stuck, I tend to think of mailboxes as having a 1:1 mapping with users. How do I give one user access to multiple mailboxes?
use offlineimap to download all the mail somewhere else in to a maildir structure, rejoice.
offlineimap looks like a nice tool and probably useful for me now that I'm using Google Apps too, although as I use Thunderbird as a mail reader I'm not sure I can get away without also installing a local imap server (which isn't really an issue if I have to). I'll investigate. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
On 29 Mar 12:03, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 29/03/11 11:52, Brett Parker wrote:
Turn on the IMAP server in exchange,
Twas always thus, I've not read mail from a Windows machine in several years so IMAP was enabled as soon as the server went in!
grant a user access to all the mailboxes,
This bit has me a bit stuck, I tend to think of mailboxes as having a 1:1 mapping with users. How do I give one user access to multiple mailboxes?
I'm assuming there's a magic way to do it in exchange... Maybe Wayne will know how... he loves exchange and can probably give you info ;)
use offlineimap to download all the mail somewhere else in to a maildir structure, rejoice.
offlineimap looks like a nice tool and probably useful for me now that I'm using Google Apps too, although as I use Thunderbird as a mail reader I'm not sure I can get away without also installing a local imap server (which isn't really an issue if I have to). I'll investigate.
It's rather handy, not sure that thunderbadger will let you talk directly to a maildir, but mutt does. :) -- Brett Parker http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ PGP Fingerprint 1A9E C066 EDEE 6746 36CB BD7F 479E C24F 95C7 1D61
participants (4)
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Brett Parker -
Jonathan McDowell -
Mark Rogers -
Richard Lewis