Hi once again guys,
Thanks for all the help you've given me in the past few weeks. I do,
however, have another issue with mailbox conversion.
After direction from this list I have looked at both Russ's and Bruce
Guenter's scripts for converting mailboxes to maildirs. Both are mostly
suitable, though there is a slight problemo.
At our site (currently using sendmail, but the plan is to move it to
qmail) customers have a tendency to leave very old mail on the server.
That is, once it's been read by their POP3 client, they elect to leave
the mail on the server, instead of deleting it. Whilst under qmail,
messages which have been read and are to be left on the server are moved
from the "new" directory to the "cur" directory, this is not the case
with mailbox-based POP3 servers.
It would be very useful if, when converting mailboxes to maildirs, I
could do a search for a tag/line of some sort, which says that a message
has been seen by POP3 already, so then I could automatically write
messages which have not been read yet to the "new" (qmail) directory,
and write seen messages to the "cur" directory. The current scripts to
do this move all messages into the "new" directory. I know that qpopper
writes "X-UIDL:" and "Status" lines, but other POP3 servers may not. An
example of this would be that previous to the qpopper server we are
using now, zpop was used, and perhaps others were used before that, both
of which may write lines to the mailbox, or even may not.
The reasoning behind this is that when we switch over to our new qmail
server, we don't want the load to go through the roof because customers
spend all their time downloading mail messages to read, which they had
previously seen under the other system, i.e. because they were now all
placed in the "new" directory.
I was also wondering on the best way to physically copy existing
mailboxes over, before they are transformed into maildirs. Presently, we
have about 13Gb of mail, and the options are tape or network. If we run
a script which filters old mail from new, we could even leave the old
messages on the old server "just in case" the customers really really
want them, and only copy the new ones over.
Thanks for any help on the above matters,
Regards,
Rich Aldridge,
Internet Systems Engineer,
Cable Internet.
