I'm still banging away at this problem and haven't yet found a
satisfactory solution.
There is a lot of mail hosted on my company's web hosting service,
it's kept in a Cyrus IMAP server and access is via Horde/Imp webmail.
This works pretty well but I'd like to be able to get at it in other
ways and to archive some of it.
So I asked the sysadmin to open up the IMAP server so I can access it
from my home machine, this he has done and I can access it via
IMAP/SSL on port 993. Using an stunnel client I can also access it as
an 'ordinary' IMAP server for clients that don't do SSL.
My two main requirements are:-
1 - To be able to copy (large) IMAP folders containing old
sentmail as archived by Horde to our home machines, it can then be
backed up there (saved to CD for instance) and removed from the
Cyrus server to save space.
2 - To be able to copy a complete hierarchy of a user's messages
on the IMAP server to a home machine. This will enable access
with a normal (as opposed to webmail) client, I may even move some
users from the remote webmail service to a home machine.
I can find no utility or mail client that does both of the above
satisfactorily. Initially one would think that any MUA that handles
IMAP mail should be able to do it but I can't find one that does.
Even the simpler requirement 1 can't be handled by most mail clients,
e.g.:-
Thunderbird - if you drag and drop a folder from the IMAP server
to a local folder the folder is copied but none of its contents
are copied, they do however appear to be removed from the remote
folder - instant loss of mail!
OE (yes someone recommended this) - simply can't be made to
move/copy folders as far as I can see.
I've tried Balsa and Kmail but neither worked, I can't remember
the exact details.
mutt - does a reasonable job, you can tag all the mail messages
in an IMAP folder and then copy them to a local folder. However
it's a bit clumsy and isn't really dealing with folders.
Moving a whole hierarchy is even more difficult because each MUA and
IMAP server seems to have its own way of arranging things, some see
INBOX as the root of a user's hierarchy, others see INBOX as just
another folder rooted at the same place as the rest of the hierarchy.
Some allow both folders and mail in a folder, some don't. Often the
view of a remote IMAP server is different from a local hierarchy.
There are a number of utilities (imapsync, iisync, imapcopy,
offlineimap, etc.) which are supposed to copy IMAP hierarchies but
none works for me yet.
A while ago I *did* successfully copy some IMAP hiearachies from a
UW-Imap server to my home system but the same utility doesn't work
satifactorily running from a Cyrus server. One of the main problems
is that Cyrus allows both folders and mail within a folder, this needs
some workarounds when transferring to a server (or mailbox hierarchy)
where this isn't possible.
Does anyone have any suggestions (apart from writing my own utility in
perl, which is where I seem to be going at the moment).
--
Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk)
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."