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