On 02/10/2013 00:06, Steve Wilson wrote:
I'm trying to plan the migration of a whole domain's email away from
google over to exim and would appreciate any feedback from the list as
to the best way to achieve this and what tools are available.

(curiously enough, I just helped a company go the other way with their user's email.)

I'm aware of imapsync and have used it frequently to take backups of
mailboxes before deletion but would like a nicer way, if possible, to
migrate users with minimal downtime for them.

in terms of mail routing, although you could use the Google 'fallback' mail routing, and then gradually remove users from Google, that's a bit 'big bang' for me. I'd go for a different approach that will give you more control - parallel delivery.

I would create aliases on your 'external' Exim server to route user's emails to Google (you can use the temporary domain alias that it would have created - ours was <domain.com>.test-google-a.com or else create another), as well as to your imap server, i.e.

(in /etc/aliases, or equivalent file)
emailaddr: [email protected],[email protected]

for all of your users email addresses, with appropriate emailaddr, username, and mailbox values.

and then switch over your MX to deliver through you, passing on mail to Google for those users who have not been migrated yet. Gradually, as you migrate them, remove the entry that forwards a copy to their Google mailbox leaving just the one that routes it to their IMAP server.

(If your 'external' Exim server and IMAP server are one and the same, then it's not so straight forward. But I'm sure the idea could be adapted appropriately.)

Then you just need to deal with backfilling the IMAP folders (there are some patches available to imapsync, that implement Google's OAUTH mechanism so that you wouldn't need every individual user's password for Google; and it's possible with systems like Dovecot to implement a fallback authentication mechanism using checkpassword that would let you do similar on your own IMAP server. But that's not really a topic for the Exim users list!)

James.

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