Moving mail server from SUSE to Slackware
 

When I first installed a server, it was on SuSE Enterprise 10. I made a home installation too, to test it in nonproductive area.
After 4 years, now, I find myself still using it. I have lots of mails on cyrus IMAP, and my MTA postfix works fine.

Now I set up my server rather on slackware then SuSE and I want to migrate my server to slackware.
Can I somehow move my existing mails to sendmail boxes?
Is there any How To for such migration?

I think that there is nothing else I want to move from old server to new, just old emails.

I haven't moved from suse to slackware, but once you've set up your mailserver on the slackware box, it should be a pretty simple matter of moving the relevant mbox files or maildir directories/files to the new server. The format of these files and directories is distro independent, so the only real potential issue is one of permissions on first thought.

Where are your mailfiles? Make sure you have backups before you start as a general rule.

I am asking because the cyrus IMAP server stores each mail in separate file and the slackwares imapd in one big file stores each mail.
I didn't mention that I want to replace cyrus IMAP with imapd on slackware and postfix with sendmail (MTA on slackware).

Sounds like you're talking about maildir vs mbox. Maildir stores one email per file, whereas mbox is one file for a whole email folder. You should be able to set your new server for maildir.

Edit - what MTA are you planning to use with slackware?

I am planning to use sendmail. As a matter of fact I did not even thought that sendmail can be set to use maildirs :(.
If so, then the maildirs should be copied to the new server and it should work??

If I new that, I would set up my all slackware - sendmail servers for maildirs. Its better, isn't it?

The good news for your migration is, that KMail has excellent import, export and conversion capabilities. If you currently use MBox, just import the files into KMail and save them back again in your favourite format.

Which mail format is best for you depends on your usage scenarios, but usually the advantages of maildir (and MH) outweigh their weaknesses.

Mbox stores alle email messages in one big file.

PRO:
- Many tools available for specialised tasks, such as archiving in HTML
- Easy exchanges of mails with different MUAs
- Practically all mail clients (MUA == Mail User Agent) support mbox, quite a few don't support anything else

CON:
- Files can become really huge, which makes handling and archiving difficult
- Hierarchical structuring of mail archives requires proprietary constructs such as index files; these are usually not portable between MUAs, unfortunately


Maildir (and as far as I recall it, MH, too) store each mail message in a separate file.

gargamel

There are quite a few scripts floating around for converting mbox to maildir and vice versa, which would eb much simpler if you have more than one user on the system.

Hey hua,

I would seriosly consider looking into Dovecot. There's a slackbuild for it, and it works a charm. Also it is extremely easy to get up and running, and you could continue using maildir.

As to the move from Postfix to Sendmail - why? Why not just stay with Postfix? There's a slackbuild for Postfix also, so it's easy to use with Slackware.

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/12.2/network/postfix/
http://slackbuilds.org/repository/12.2/network/dovecot/
http://dovecot.org

I have nothing against postfix... I have no troubles with it and It has really simple configuration files. I would rather go on sendmail because of the update system of slackware security. I get security notifications about new patches. So it is simple to keep my apps up to date.

Same here.

Also: Configuring Sendmail isn't more complicated than configuring Postfix, anymore, in recent versions. M4 is still a bit strange, but the M4 scripts for Sendmail have come a long way in recent years. And regarding security, Sendmail proved very robust in the recent past, while Postfix finally exposed some vulnerabilities.
Last point: Sendmail has a slightly more modular architecture than Postfix, which is a bit more monolithic. It's therefore a bit easier to extend Sendmail with "Plug-ins" or "Modules" (I don't recall the correct term, right now), such as Milter for Spam protection, than Postfix.

But, of course, both MTAs are great efforts, and certainly the success of Postfix was an important driver for the many improvements in Sendmail over the last five or six years. And while it looked like Sendmail wouldn't be able to keep pace with its challengers, it finally caught up.

Good for us, as we can choose between two excellent pieces of software.

gargamel