[olug] caching mail locally

[Phil Brutsche]

#1 - Done it. Used fetchmail to deliver to Cyrus IMAP via LMTP.

I don't suggest you use Courier IMAP. Biggest reason: performance, or
lack thereof. Traditional Maildirs do not lend themselves to IMAP very
well: each time your client needs to regenerate the list of mail
messages in a particular the IMAP process needs to scan through each and
every file in the folder to pull out the header information.

I suggest Dovecot IMAP (for it's non-standard indexed Maildirs) or Cyrus
IMAP instead.

When I switched to Cyrus IMAP it blew Courier out of the water on the
same hardware (at the time dual PII @ 400MHz, 1GB RAM, IDE drives).
Dovecot didn't exist at the time.

#2 - Thunderbird, on all platforms, uses what could be considered mbox
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox) mail folders. There is a very large
corpus of programs that can read and write those files:
 a) pine
 b) alpine
 c) the UW-IMAP IMAP service and related POP3 service
 d) the IMAP and POP3 portions of Dovecot
 e) Netscape Navigator, all versions
 d) Mozilla Suite (and it's successor, Mozilla SeaMonkey), all versions
 f) Mozilla Thunderbird, all versions
 g) mail(1)

That list isn't anywhere *close* to being complete.

The easiest way - not necessarily the best way ;) - to convert your
locally-stored messages from Thunderbird to an IMAP account is to drag
and drop the mail folders from the "Local Folders" account into the IMAP
account. It's tedious if you have to convert a large number of mail
folders and/or a large number of email accounts but it will work.

Alternatively, set up 2 IMAP servers, one for the source (to handle your
Thunderbird-sourced mbox mail folders) and the other for the destination
IMAP server; use imapsync (http://www.linux-france.org/prj/imapsync/) to
synchronize the IMAP accounts.

Tim & Alethea Larson wrote:
> Two questions:
> 
> 1) I'd like to pull my Cox mail to a local server so that I can access 
> it from multiple PCs in the house, maintaining a single mailbox and not 
> creating havoc.  I've been looking at getmail (POP3 fetch) and Courier 
> (local IMAP) to do this.  Has anyone done something similar?  If there 
> are any caveats here, I'd like to know before I jump in.
> 
> 2) We currently have years worth of email stored locally.  We use 
> Thunderbird as our client.  I don't know what format it uses, but I'm 
> trying to find out if there's a way to convert this to the maildir 
> format so I can drop it all out on the server.

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us