Import Archive Emails

[mazarian]

Hi all,

Please excuse me if this has been covered before (if so, would love a pointer!). I have a customer with lots of archived email boxes (originally PST & converted to MBOX format) and I was wondering if anyone has any tips on importing them into Cloudron email.

My goal is to have a web-based, easily searchable mailbox for each archived mail account. If it's possible to convert the MBOX files into something that works with Cloudron, my idea is to setup a subdomain dedicated to archived accounts, and create logins for each inbox (archiveduser1@archive.example.com).

Any help in achieving this is greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[girish]

@mazarian you should be able to convert mbox to maildir (the format used in Cloudron). Then just copy the maildir files into /home/yellowtent/boxdata/mail/vmail/<mailbox>/ and restart mail server (Services -> mail -> restart).

If you do this, can you please put some notes here? Incidentally, I also have mbox'es from my previous mail addresses that I have long wanted to imported but haven't gotten around to.

[girish]

Looks like mb2md is the tool for the job.

[BrutalBirdie]

@girish I did this exact thing one week ago.
I migrated an old FusionDirectory mailserver to Cloudron and it went something like that:

rsync -arlP username/Maildir/ yellowtent@my.domain.tld:~/boxdata/mail/vmail/user@subdomain.domain.tld/mail/

and it went all good.

(ps: I added my personal ssh key to the yellowtent user so I could use rsync like that)

[girish]

@brutalbirdie Ah nice, did you have to do mbox to maildir conversion as well?

[BrutalBirdie]

@girish I think not no.

[mazarian]

@girish Thank you for the pointer! I've spent a bit of time trying to convert my MBOX files using mb2md and it seems like there's some sort of bug that isn't working with my files.

I am getting the following error thousands of times:

Use of uninitialized value $t in utime at /usr/bin/mb2md line 1043, <MBOX> line 36621221

I will report back when I have a solution!

[girish]

@mazarian I found that error message deep in https://kb.pocnet.net/wiki/Mails_aus_Eudora_exportieren . I don't speak german but translate says "The cause is still open and the implications of this message have not yet been clarified." There seems to be a sed command below it.

[d19dotca]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread. Was recently struggling with migrating (using imapsync) an Office365 account, and it seems to do with Microsoft deprecating Basic Auth method for authentication so there's a whole set of hoops to run through to publish an application in Microsft Azure and get an OAuth access token and what-not to use in the imapsync. It's an over-complicated process.

The workaround I chose since it was thankfully only one mailbox was to setup my local Apple Mail.app with the Exchange account, and waited for everything to download locally. I then used it to export the the mailbox folders which it only does in mbox format. This is where our use-cases align I believe as I was wondering how to import this since Cloudron's mail server uses maildir instead of mbox.

I then learned that Roundcube imports mbox data directly, so simply imported through the app interface and it worked well. Just thought I'd add this as an alternative solution for anyone who comes across this in the future. Turns out Microsoft made the whole imapsync process nearly impossible to use due to their deprecation of Basic Auth just recently in October 2022.