MacOS Server uses Dovecot; if your new mail host runs Dovecot, I think
that the tags will transfer.
If they're friendly, you'll be able to copy over the Dovecot
directories. However, when I did that on a (non-Apple) Dovecot server I
run, I had to delete the dovecot.index* files.
On 12 Feb 2018, at 18:46, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:
Thanks, Paul. That might work, if our hosting service will support our
large volumes of saved mail (probably yes, if I throw money at them)
and if their server fully supports tags (I’m sure I can find one
that does).
We are still among those who, in spite of Benny’s advice, would like
to keep a local (and properly tagged) mail archive, so I’m still
interested in finding a way to do that. But it’s good to know that
we have at least one solution likely to work for us; thanks for that!
On 12 Feb 2018, at 15:38, Paul Sture wrote:
One of the beauties of IMAP is that if you point your mail client at
two servers, you can drag existing mails from one server to the
other. I initially did this to transfer stuff from a POP
server/client setup into IMAP with a different email provider.
Where both servers are remote, everything which isn't cached locally
has to come down to your local machine, then out to the other one, so
it can take quite some time, but that's just a matter of patience.
Since you use your own MacOS server plus MailMate, the incoming leg
of that journey should be trivial.
As far as the nitty gritty of the transfer goes, the last time I did
this was several years ago, but as far as I recall I created a dummy
account on the target IMAP system to dump everything into, then
created each account in turn and moved them into the right place.
The only catch I recall was deciding when to change my MX records to
point at the new server, and ensuring that no emails arriving in the
transition period got lost. Copious double checking satisfied me
there.
On 13 Feb 2018, at 0:16, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:
We have a small email server box of our own, running Apple MacOS
Server. We access it with Mailmate, and we use Mailmate’s tags
feature heavily to organize our tens of thousands of messages.
Apple has announced that it will discontinue the mail server
feature. We are going to have to move to a hosted server somewhere.
(Helpful people: Please don’t respond with suggestions on how to
avoid this move. I’ve been through all that already, thanks.) We
intend to continue to use Mailmate after the move. (We really like
Mailmate.)
This means that we need a way to preserve our archived mail.
That’s easy enough—EagleFiler will do it, or we could just make
a Finder copy of our cache folders. But these mechanisms do not
preserve the tags (even though both EagleFiler and the Finder do
support tagging), so we will lose all of our carefully-built-up
organization.
Is there any way to preserve not just the mail, but also the tags
that we have applied in Mailmate? I have explored the Application
Support > Mailmate folder, but as far as I can tell the tag info is
not stored there, except for a handy list of all the tag names.
As far as I know, we won’t be able to simply transfer our mail
from our own server to a hosted server.
I’m a programmer; if I know where the info is kept, I might even
be able to build some custom software to do the job for us…
although I expect the task of (say) building my own “mail
client” just to download mail and tags is pretty daunting.
Thanks for any help!
— Rick Holzgrafe
r...@semicolon.com
http://www.semicolon.com
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— Rick Holzgrafe
r...@semicolon.com
http://www.semicolon.com
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--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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