Today I was trying to upload a lot of mail (something like 160000 mails stored in a deeply nested folder structure of about 13000 folders) to an IMAP server. Those mails were converted from the Eudora mailbox format to a more sane Eudora mailbox format using “Eudora rescue”, and then imported into Thunderbird’s “Local folders”. From there, so we thought, it would only be a matter of minutes to put those mails onto the newly setup dovecot IMAP server, with one drag-and-drop action.
But…
The upload horribly failed after the 3rd folder or so, with no error message whatsoever. No matter what I tried, it would just fail silently. The debug logging (see Debugging/Thunderbird article in the Dovecot wiki) didn’t help, and neither did dovecot’s log on the server. The problem seems to be connected with creating folders on the server somehow – because uploading a big amount (400 for a small test) mails within one folder wasn’t a problem. I couldn’t find out if Thunderbird or dovecot is to blame here…
I eventually managed to get this big pile of mail to the server by using a perl script that I found on perlmonks.org. Thanks to Davis for providing this! I downloaded it, installed the Mail::MboxParser and Mail::IMAPClient dependencies (with two ‘cpan install …’ calls), changed the configuration in the script to our site’s data and ran it. ~30 minutes later, the mails were on the server. Only thing that could have been better: All mails were ‘marked as unread’ – but that’s easy to fix.
Update:
After looking into the perl code, I found a way to ‘mark as read’ during the transfer. I posted it under the original perlmonks.org script as a comment.
