Adventures in IMAP: Migrating lots of mail to Atmail

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Besides my day job as a front-end developer at 2degrees
(http://2degreesnetwork.com), I run my own web design company with my partner,
called Marmalade & Jam (http://marmaladeandjam.co.uk).

When launching Marmalade & Jam, I decided to go with 123-reg as I needed a quick
way to get everything up and running, and at the time they seemed like a good
deal.

I setup a handful of our clients on 123-reg, migrating a couple of our inherited
clients over from Bluehost, and immediately found an issue with the mail service
that 123-reg provided – They don’t have the capability to let you set a single
email address as an inbox and a forwarder.

As I didn’t want to have to mess our clients around
(having already migrated them to 123-reg) I set the mail up to have one address
that acts as a forwarder, and one address as an inbox
(which the forwarder would send to, as well as to any other addresses).

This worked okay for a while, but ultimately it wasn’t the best way to do
things, and I had to find a better, more managable, solution for any newer
clients.

In the end, I decided to rent a VPS and set up my own Postfix/Dovecot mail
server. This worked great for me as I liked having full control over the whole
thing, and even though it was a bit of a steep learning experience to setup, it
worked out well in the end. Sort of.

The problems I had with running my own Postfix mail server included most of the
following:

* Even with clear/concise instructions on how to setup IMAP, customers still
  failed to set it up correctly on their end
* Squirrel Mail as a webmail client sucks
* Settings up SSL certificates is a pain
* For some reason incoming/outgoing mail was being greylisted all the time,
  causing delays in delivery (and for one customer a missed meeting!)

So I had to find a better solution. As it turned out, the latest of those
problems co-incided with it being time to renew my annual subscription on
123-reg.

Along with the issues with 123-reg mail, I decided it would be better to host
the websites elsewhere, so I transitioned to using a Linode VPS
(http://www.linode.com/?r=99ca38bfbf1c8c22e3e88622fa6b62b3ee3f5993) for all of
my web hosting needs, and that has worked wonderfully.

Back to the mail, I decided to move from my own Postfix mail server, to using a
hosted “pay per inbox” solution elsewhere. The Postfix
maintenance/debugging/complaints overhead was too much for me, and the final
product was only as polished as I could make it, so I decided to switch to
Atmail Cloud (http://atmail.com/cloudnow/). They provide a 14-day trial which
was perfect for me to test that it could do everything I needed, and within 2
days I had all of the 20 or so client inboxes and forwarders moved over to
atmail.

That process was made a lot easier with the use of imapcopy
(https://code.google.com/p/imapcopy/), which I simply made a bash script to run
it through each inbox on the old servers (123-reg and Postfix) to copy them to
their new inbox on atmail:

#!/bin/bash

./imapCopy.sh imap://user1:pass1@old_mailserver
imap://user1:pass1@new_mailserver
./imapCopy.sh imap://user2:pass2@old_mailserver
imap://user2:pass2@new_mailserver
./imapCopy.sh imap://user3:pass3@old_mailserver
imap://user3:pass3@new_mailserver
./imapCopy.sh imap://user4:pass4@old_mailserver
imap://user4:pass4@new_mailserver

# ad infinitum...

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Published October 02, 2013

Generated from the original post:
https://blog.omgmog.net/post/adventures-in-imap-migrating-mail-to-atmail/


Max Glenister is an interface designer and senior full-stack developer from
Oxfordshire. He writes mostly about front-end development and technology.

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