I'm having troubles migrating the email system of our company from an old provider to a new one, call this one FOO.
I already created, via control panel, the email addresses and the mailboxes on FOO to duplicate the existing structure. To check that everything works I added and configured a new account on each email client with FOO smtp and imap data and did a simple send and receive. So far so good, clients send and receive mails without any problem.
The problem is that new mailboxes on FOO are empty and I need to populate them with existing mails.
What I have: for each client of my local users I have a bunch of .eml files organized in folders (Inbox, Sent Items, etc.). Each .eml is a mail.
What I want: for each account I want to import these .eml files into FOO mailboxes, so I can configure the clients with FOO imap server/username/password and users have their mails available again.
Initially I did this way: on my personal local Thunderbird installation I created one account for each user account to migrate. I imported (via ImportExportTools TB extension) .eml files into the newly created account. Automatically Thunderbird syncs mails between local client and the imap server on WF.
It would be GREAT if it'd work… but after some time the task failed. Sometimes for timeouts, another times for network problems and so on... Basically the process stops for some reason and I can't get all my mail into the remote server.
I have to migrate a lot of mails (avg of 5/6 Gb for each user).
My solution:
- for each existing client to migrate create a zip containing the corresponding .eml files.
- upload each zip to my FOO account (using scp or ftp, I have to think about that)
- install a command line mail client (pine? mutt? others?! WHICH ONE?) in my FOO account
- create a mail account for each account to migrate
- import .eml into the client and hope that IMAP sync happens
To me it seems fairly complex, and I'm not even sure it could work. Do you have a better solution for this? And which client does it support eml import and IMAP?
Any suggestion greatly appreciated.