Rough notage…
A big complicated copy and paste job for when it’s not possible to directly transfer mail accounts between servers – do it in the evening.
DNS pointing to current mail/webmail server
Set up mailboxes on new mailserver, install and configure roundcube (won’t work properly until mail.domain.com working on new server)
(Set up mail subfolders on new server while waiting during some of the steps below.)
Logged into clients local machine using their gotomypc account
Configured their outlook express program:
Created new imap accounts for each mailbox (info@domain, admin@domain, etc.)
Created new pop accounts for each mailbox as above
(make sure to name the accounts eg. pop info@, imap info@, pop admin@, imap admin@, so that they’re easy to identify!)
Downloaded all inbox messages (these then needed sorted into subfolders of outlook express’ global inbox – was able to identify by account details as defined above – probably could have done this better)
Then synchronised all folders for all the imap accounts – and set sync settings to grab folders, headers and all messages for all accounts
Then copied all messages from sent, draft, any other folders, to respective folders in outlook express global pop account (making subfolders when required e.g. sent > info@, sent > admin@
This took ages to download all mail – many MBs and copy across
Then took a back up of outlook express mailboxes, stored and zipped
Then switched dns to new server
Reset and re-synced all the imap folders after testing to make sure that roundcube working (mail. dns updated)
(remember to make all imap folders for each account visible in outlook express – make sure the accounts are set NOT TO CHECK FOR MAIL especially the pop account as it will download any messages you’ve just uploaded to server…)
All imap folders now empty!
Next step was to copy all the mail from the respective POP global account folders to the new imap folders – the imap on the new server then got populated as the messages were uploaded.
Test the accounts and adjust any roundcube settings as required.
Re-advise client to use a pop3 mail solution and use the ‘leave messages on server for x days’ feature 🙂
