A set of scripts, tools, and notes to help convert from an mbox-formatted set of mailboxes to Maildir mailboxes.
The Obscure Organization has historically used mbox-format mailboxes, but we are finally moving to Maildir.
As part of this effort, we are suspending mail delivery to mailboxes that have not been checked for more than a year. See the find-active-mail-users script.
I followed the guidelines here roughly:
http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/2007/04/18/adams-super-simple-guide-to-mbox-maildir-conversion
I did this once straight through with mb2md 3.20, and found that the messages were in a weirdly random order in alpine in the 'arrived' state. To fix this I amended the mb2md program to prefix mail file names with the timestamp corresponding to the From date of the email. Those changes are now here:
https://github.com/obscureorganization/mb2md
The mb2md.pl script lives in /usr/local/bin/mb2md.pl and the sources are in /usr/local/src/production/mb2md on tiamat:
I cleaned up my own mail directories before I began:
- Changed the procmail mail default directory back to mail/
- Changed the names of procmail-sorted incoming directories so that they started with ">" because they sort better that way in iOS mail
Here is a snippet of my procmail config:
MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/
#Set on when debugging
VERBOSE=off
#Directory for storing procmail log and rc files
PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail
LOGFILE=$PMDIR/log
:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
.ZZZ_caughtspam/
* ^[email protected]
.majordomo.log/
# SSL Certificate warnings need to go into main inbox
:0
* ^[email protected]
* $ ${FROM}(comodo.com)
$DEFAULT
# Put messages to postmaster in their own folder
:0
* ^TO(postmaster|MAILER-DAEMON|majordomo-owner)
.AAA_postmaster/
Alter procmail recipies to have all folders prefixed with "." and suffixed with "/" and convert mailbox names with "." in them to "", since mb2md changes mailbox names that have a "." in them to have a "" instead.
Here is the series of scripts that I ran to convert my own mail spool:
time ~/bin/mb2md.pl -U -K -S -t -m
echo time ~/bin/mb2md.pl -U -K -S -t -s mail -R | batch
It would be better to do it all in one go, though, and batch is a good way of moderating that:
batch <<EOF
time /usr/local/bin/mb2md.pl -U -K -S -t -m
time /usr/local/bin/mb2md.pl -U -K -S -t -s mail -R
EOF
This script is now in convert-mbox-to-maildir in this project.
Here is a good way to gauge how many people are still using the legacy imapd:
sudo grep imapd /var/log/maillog /var/log/maillog.* | awk '/Login/{print $7}'
| cut -f2 -d= | sort -u > imapusers.txt
wc -l imapusers.txt
Thanks go to Scott Hanselman for the suggestion and instructions on switching the git default branch from master to main. This repository transitioned to using main as its default branch on 2020-06-14.
Copyright © 2020 by The Obscure Organization
This software is MIT licensed, see LICENSE for details.