Good utility for copying IMAP folders to local system (IMAP or mbox or maildir)

use...@isbd.co.uk

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May 31, 2005, 8:27:29 AM5/31/05

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I'm looking for a good utility to copy some remote (Cyrus) IMAP mail
folders to my home system. I have two slightly different
requirements:-
1 - copy individual folders which contain archived sent mail.
2 - copy all of a user's hierarchy of folders.

I've spent quite a while searching but haven't found anything which
actually works yet. One of the problems is the remote Cyrus server
which allows both folders and mail in a folder which can cause
problems at the receiving end unless there are options to work around
this. The UW Imap 'mailutil transfer' utility almost works but falls
over because of the Cyrus problem.

No MUA I've tried can even do requirement 1 above, Thunderbird for
example looks like it has worked but the folders it creates on the
local system are empty and it appears to empty the remote folder in
the process - not very helpful!

Can anyone suggest a simple, straightforward IMAP folder copying
utility that actually works?

--
Chris Green

BS

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Jun 2, 2005, 12:14:22 PM6/2/05

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You are looking for imapxfer, and with a patch available somewhere on
the net (cannot remember where, but it is googleable), it can take two
hostnames, and login id's/password, etc then migrate the mail folders
from one host to the other. This has the added advantage of building
all the necessary file structures, and UID files simultaneously.

Bimble.

use...@isbd.co.uk

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Jun 2, 2005, 5:00:59 PM6/2/05

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Surely imapxfer has been superseded by mailutil, which I've already
tried and doesn't really work too well (as I've described earlier in
this thread I think).

--
Chris Green

ink

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Jun 8, 2005, 5:10:44 PM6/8/05

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Compusven has a product called 'email shuttle' that we've been using.
It's commercial, but it works.

Mark

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Jun 22, 2005, 2:15:18 PM6/22/05

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You could try fetchmail: if you used eg procmail as the local delivery
agent you could probably force the copied mail into some form of structure.

Mark

use...@isbd.co.uk

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Jun 22, 2005, 5:31:29 PM6/22/05

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Fetchmail only fetches from INBOX I believe, or if not it collects
everything into one stream. I want to preserve the hierarchy of
folders.

--
Chris Green

wkearney99

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Jun 23, 2005, 12:28:10 AM6/23/05

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> Fetchmail only fetches from INBOX I believe

No, you can specify the mailbox source, it doesn't have to be just INBOX.
Same thing for delivery.

use...@isbd.co.uk

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Jun 23, 2005, 5:32:50 AM6/23/05

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Yes, but then I need to know what the hierarchy looks like before I
start. The mail I'm wanting to transfer comprises several hundred
folders in a deep hierarchy, I need something that will automatically
'find' its way through it.

--
Chris Green

Mark

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Jun 23, 2005, 6:08:34 AM6/23/05

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Shouldn't be too hard to knock something up in Perl or Python or
whatever. I know this isn't a very helpful answer if you just
(understandably) want an off-the-shelf solution.

Mark

Sam

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Jun 23, 2005, 9:12:15 AM6/23/05

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Mark writes:

http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/mailtool.html is a command line tool that
shows the folder hierarchy tree on the IMAP server.

use...@isbd.co.uk

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Jun 23, 2005, 9:25:18 AM6/23/05

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I do have a solution now, someone sent me a perl script that, with a
little debugging and manipulation, does what I want.

--
Chris Green