Fw: Re: IMAP server and client recommendations?
From: Kevin Stevens [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 21:42:00 -0700 To: Danny MacMillan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: IMAP server and client recommendations? X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.613) On Apr 21, 2004, at 21:22, Danny MacMillan wrote: Hello. I have six or seven hundred megabytes of email imprisoned in a few .pst (Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders) files. I've been looking for an alternative email client lately. Of course, the issue is converting these old messages so that they are usable by the new software -- ideally so that multiple clients could access the mail. The thought that immediately occurred to me was that one of the standard Unix formats -- mbox or maildir -- would be appropriate for this task. After scouring the internet for possibilities for converting between the hated .pst format and mbox or Maildir, I found a few people who'd seemingly hit upon an ideal solution: add an IMAP folder to Outlook and copy their mail to that folder, then do the reverse inside a client that stores its mail in mbox or maildir format. Almost right, but not quite. You set up an IMAP server that stores mail in the desired format, add the IMAP support to Outlook, and then drag/drop the mail into the IMAP mailbox. There is no equivalent client-side export needed. And yes, in my experience this is BY FAR the easiest/fastest/best approach to get mail from a .pst file to something else. Caveat is that you have to have an Outlook installation available to do it, not just the .pst file. Then it struck me -- =leaving= the mail in the IMAP server would give me even more flexibility. Blinding flash of the obvious? ;) Is it feasible to use the IMAP server as a mail storage solution like this? Sure, that's what they're designed for. Can anyone recommend a good IMAP server (for FreeBSD of course) and give me some tips on considerations for choosing one? I blush to say it, but I've never even had an IMAP account. The main contenders are Cyrus, Courier, and UW-IMAP. Biggest consideration is probably what format you want to store the mail in. I prefer mbox format, so use UW-IMAP. It is configured to pull mail from the standard spool directory, and store it in a /mail directory of my user account. The big advantage of using IMAP (for me) is that I can access my mail from a web based server (Squirrelmail) while at work, pine when on the road, and OS X's Mail.app when at home on my PowerBook. Even when I'm reading mail on the server box itself the access is actually through the IMAP server. It's an OS X G5 now, but I did the exact same thing when it was a FreeBSD Intel box. KeS - End forwarded message - There's a note for future reference. If you want to run a large email server that'll play friendly with Outlook, OS mail clients, and webmail, use an IMAP server. Question: Is Exchange an IMAP server, or is Exchange kinda it's own thing? Maybe, rather, does Exchange speak IMAP? -- Joshua ...and *no* funny stuff; and by funny stuff I mean, handholding, goo-goo eyes, misdirected woo (which is pretty much any John Wu film...) -- Homer Simpson ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: IMAP server and client recommendations?
You could download Eudora for Windows and import the outlook email into Eudora. It stores the email in mbox format. I don't know if their mbox format is fully unix standard, but they are the same people that maintain the qpopper pop3 daemon, so they obviously understand unix mbox format. Cla. - Original Message - From: Joshua Lokken [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004 4:47 PM Subject: Fw: Re: IMAP server and client recommendations? From: Kevin Stevens [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 21:42:00 -0700 To: Danny MacMillan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: IMAP server and client recommendations? X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.613) On Apr 21, 2004, at 21:22, Danny MacMillan wrote: Hello. I have six or seven hundred megabytes of email imprisoned in a few .pst (Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders) files. I've been looking for an alternative email client lately. Of course, the issue is converting these old messages so that they are usable by the new software -- ideally so that multiple clients could access the mail. The thought that immediately occurred to me was that one of the standard Unix formats -- mbox or maildir -- would be appropriate for this task. After scouring the internet for possibilities for converting between the hated .pst format and mbox or Maildir, I found a few people who'd seemingly hit upon an ideal solution: add an IMAP folder to Outlook and copy their mail to that folder, then do the reverse inside a client that stores its mail in mbox or maildir format. Almost right, but not quite. You set up an IMAP server that stores mail in the desired format, add the IMAP support to Outlook, and then drag/drop the mail into the IMAP mailbox. There is no equivalent client-side export needed. And yes, in my experience this is BY FAR the easiest/fastest/best approach to get mail from a .pst file to something else. Caveat is that you have to have an Outlook installation available to do it, not just the .pst file. Then it struck me -- =leaving= the mail in the IMAP server would give me even more flexibility. Blinding flash of the obvious? ;) Is it feasible to use the IMAP server as a mail storage solution like this? Sure, that's what they're designed for. Can anyone recommend a good IMAP server (for FreeBSD of course) and give me some tips on considerations for choosing one? I blush to say it, but I've never even had an IMAP account. The main contenders are Cyrus, Courier, and UW-IMAP. Biggest consideration is probably what format you want to store the mail in. I prefer mbox format, so use UW-IMAP. It is configured to pull mail from the standard spool directory, and store it in a /mail directory of my user account. The big advantage of using IMAP (for me) is that I can access my mail from a web based server (Squirrelmail) while at work, pine when on the road, and OS X's Mail.app when at home on my PowerBook. Even when I'm reading mail on the server box itself the access is actually through the IMAP server. It's an OS X G5 now, but I did the exact same thing when it was a FreeBSD Intel box. KeS - End forwarded message - There's a note for future reference. If you want to run a large email server that'll play friendly with Outlook, OS mail clients, and webmail, use an IMAP server. Question: Is Exchange an IMAP server, or is Exchange kinda it's own thing? Maybe, rather, does Exchange speak IMAP? -- Joshua ...and *no* funny stuff; and by funny stuff I mean, handholding, goo-goo eyes, misdirected woo (which is pretty much any John Wu film...) -- Homer Simpson ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: IMAP server and client recommendations?
Clarence Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: You could download Eudora for Windows and import the outlook email into Eudora. It stores the email in mbox format. I don't know if their mbox format is fully unix standard, but they are the same people that maintain the qpopper pop3 daemon, so they obviously understand unix mbox format. When Eudora uploads to an IMAP server, it damages the message. It mutates MIME headers and puts in fake HTML which only Eudora can recognize. Been through this with a bunch of customers, lots of scripts to fix the Eudora-damaged mail, not any fun. It's stupid for them to intentionally break MIME-formatted mail but that's what they do. ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: IMAP server and client recommendations?
Danny MacMillan a écrit : Is it feasible to use the IMAP server as a mail storage solution like this? Can anyone recommend a good IMAP server (for FreeBSD of course) and give me some tips on considerations for choosing one? I blush to say it, but I've never even had an IMAP account. Thanks in advance. Hello Danny I administer the mailhub of our site (http://www.esiee.fr) we use UW imap server for all of our 2500 users. We are an engineers school in electronics and have about 2000 students that use different machines/OS inside the school. The machine is a COMPAQ Proliant 360 with 2.5 Gb RAM and _a lot_ of disk space. The main advantage of imap is the emails stay on the server and every user can access its mailboxes from anywhere and find the same environnement when accessing from different machines. The main problem is disk space if you have many users but thoses days harddisks are cheap. Also think to a method to bachup mailboxes. We also use an old webmail that access emails thru IMAP. Speaking about formats mbox or maildir For historical reasons we use mbox but if I have to build a new Imap server I think I'll choose maildir which is slower to access but more safe one file per email this is of course a personnal thought. Hope this helps -- Cordialement, Frank Bonnet ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: IMAP server and client recommendations?
Danny MacMillan wrote: Hello. I have six or seven hundred megabytes of email imprisoned in a few .pst (Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders) files. I've been looking for an alternative email client lately. Of course, the issue is converting these old messages so that they are usable by the new software -- ideally so that multiple clients could access the mail. The thought that immediately occurred to me was that one of the standard Unix formats -- mbox or maildir -- would be appropriate for this task. After scouring the internet for possibilities for converting between the hated .pst format and mbox or Maildir, I found a few people who'd seemingly hit upon an ideal solution: add an IMAP folder to Outlook and copy their mail to that folder, then do the reverse inside a client that stores its mail in mbox or maildir format. Then it struck me -- =leaving= the mail in the IMAP server would give me even more flexibility. Is it feasible to use the IMAP server as a mail storage solution like this? Can anyone recommend a good IMAP server (for FreeBSD of course) and give me some tips on considerations for choosing one? I blush to say it, but I've never even had an IMAP account. First, I agree with you and others that this is a good way to go. Second, I just want to add one more choice to the list of excellent IMAP servers you might want to use: dovecot. I've found dovecot to be fast, and simple compared to other IMAP servers. Of course, the biggest problem with open source software is there are too many good choices :) -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: IMAP server and client recommendations?
* Danny MacMillan [EMAIL PROTECTED] [0423 05:23]: Hello. I have six or seven hundred megabytes of email imprisoned in a few .pst (Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders) files. I've been looking for an alternative email client lately. Of course, the issue is converting these old messages so that they are usable by the new software -- ideally so that multiple clients could access the mail. The thought that immediately occurred to me was that one of the standard Unix formats -- mbox or maildir -- would be appropriate for this task. After scouring the internet for possibilities for converting between the hated .pst format and mbox or Maildir, I found a few people who'd seemingly hit upon an ideal solution: add an IMAP folder to Outlook and copy their mail to that folder, then do the reverse inside a client that stores its mail in mbox or maildir format. Then it struck me -- =leaving= the mail in the IMAP server would give me even more flexibility. I use cyrus with - mozilla, mutt, outlook express, squirrelmail, thunderbird osx and zaurus clients - it's great. Add an LDOP address book and use sieve instead of the evil thet is Procmail and you have a single point of failure^W control for all your maily needs (Mail is again 1 per file, but you don't usually access it direct. That's a Good Thing IMO, a Maildir in my home directory is too breakable...) Courier didn't scale for me, dovecot wasn't configurable enough. Cyrus is a bit more complex, but behaves itself and performs very well. Lots of howtos, try a few and see what you like. -- Blood is thicker than water, and much tastier. Rasputin :: Jack of All Trades - Master of Nuns ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: IMAP server and client recommendations?
On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 05:42:00 +0100, in local.freebsd.questions you wrote: Almost right, but not quite. You set up an IMAP server that stores mail in the desired format, add the IMAP support to Outlook, and then drag/drop the mail into the IMAP mailbox. There is no equivalent client-side export needed. Not always possible, unfortunately. Outlook 2000 with a MAPI connection to an Exchange server lets you add a POP3 service but not IMAP. ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: IMAP server and client recommendations?
I have had good luck with uw-imap and dovecot. Dovecot seems to work better in FreeBSD 5.21 though. I had problems with uw-imap crashing. Dovecot is arguably more secure. The main drawback to dovecot is that it allows multiple clients access to a mailbox at once. It works great for well behaved clients but MacOS X's mail.app occasionaly screws up when deleting and downloading new messages simultaneously with dovecot. It never occurred with uw-imapd. As for clients, I use mail.app on OSX, pine on the road through ssh (or when booted into FreeBSD at home), and Outlook 2003. I had a lot of trouble with Office XP's imap support, but it seems much better in 2003. Mozilla works ok as well. Old versions of netscape mail didn't handle deleting messages very cleanly. ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: IMAP server and client recommendations?
On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 15:40:40 +0100, Jim Hatfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 05:42:00 +0100, in local.freebsd.questions you wrote: Almost right, but not quite. You set up an IMAP server that stores mail in the desired format, add the IMAP support to Outlook, and then drag/drop the mail into the IMAP mailbox. There is no equivalent client-side export needed. Not always possible, unfortunately. Outlook 2000 with a MAPI connection to an Exchange server lets you add a POP3 service but not IMAP. I use Outlook 2000, but this is not a problem in my case, as I don't use Exchange. If I did though, I could get around it by copying all my mail from Exchange into a local .pst, hit the fantabulous Reconfigure Mail Support in Outlook and specify Internet Only, then add the IMAP account and proceed as before. Thanks everyone for your suggestions. -- D Rock ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
IMAP server and client recommendations?
Hello. I have six or seven hundred megabytes of email imprisoned in a few .pst (Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders) files. I've been looking for an alternative email client lately. Of course, the issue is converting these old messages so that they are usable by the new software -- ideally so that multiple clients could access the mail. The thought that immediately occurred to me was that one of the standard Unix formats -- mbox or maildir -- would be appropriate for this task. After scouring the internet for possibilities for converting between the hated .pst format and mbox or Maildir, I found a few people who'd seemingly hit upon an ideal solution: add an IMAP folder to Outlook and copy their mail to that folder, then do the reverse inside a client that stores its mail in mbox or maildir format. Then it struck me -- =leaving= the mail in the IMAP server would give me even more flexibility. Is it feasible to use the IMAP server as a mail storage solution like this? Can anyone recommend a good IMAP server (for FreeBSD of course) and give me some tips on considerations for choosing one? I blush to say it, but I've never even had an IMAP account. Thanks in advance. -- D Money ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: IMAP server and client recommendations?
On Apr 21, 2004, at 21:22, Danny MacMillan wrote: Hello. I have six or seven hundred megabytes of email imprisoned in a few .pst (Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders) files. I've been looking for an alternative email client lately. Of course, the issue is converting these old messages so that they are usable by the new software -- ideally so that multiple clients could access the mail. The thought that immediately occurred to me was that one of the standard Unix formats -- mbox or maildir -- would be appropriate for this task. After scouring the internet for possibilities for converting between the hated .pst format and mbox or Maildir, I found a few people who'd seemingly hit upon an ideal solution: add an IMAP folder to Outlook and copy their mail to that folder, then do the reverse inside a client that stores its mail in mbox or maildir format. Almost right, but not quite. You set up an IMAP server that stores mail in the desired format, add the IMAP support to Outlook, and then drag/drop the mail into the IMAP mailbox. There is no equivalent client-side export needed. And yes, in my experience this is BY FAR the easiest/fastest/best approach to get mail from a .pst file to something else. Caveat is that you have to have an Outlook installation available to do it, not just the .pst file. Then it struck me -- =leaving= the mail in the IMAP server would give me even more flexibility. Blinding flash of the obvious? ;) Is it feasible to use the IMAP server as a mail storage solution like this? Sure, that's what they're designed for. Can anyone recommend a good IMAP server (for FreeBSD of course) and give me some tips on considerations for choosing one? I blush to say it, but I've never even had an IMAP account. The main contenders are Cyrus, Courier, and UW-IMAP. Biggest consideration is probably what format you want to store the mail in. I prefer mbox format, so use UW-IMAP. It is configured to pull mail from the standard spool directory, and store it in a /mail directory of my user account. The big advantage of using IMAP (for me) is that I can access my mail from a web based server (Squirrelmail) while at work, pine when on the road, and OS X's Mail.app when at home on my PowerBook. Even when I'm reading mail on the server box itself the access is actually through the IMAP server. It's an OS X G5 now, but I did the exact same thing when it was a FreeBSD Intel box. KeS ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
