How to move ~/Mail from one computer to another?

chombee chombee at lavabit.com
Tue Jul 20 00:03:02 UTC 2010


I already have my IMAP accounts synced to a ~/Mail folder on computer
A. I now have a new computer B, and I don't want to have to start
again on B by using offlineimap to download all my mail from scratch,
that would take ages.

If I sneakernet the ~/Mail folder from computer A to computer B and then
run offlineimap on computer B, should everything work as expected (i.e.
offlineimap will continue syncing from where it left off the last time
it was run on computer A)? I don't want to run offlineimap and see it do
something terrible, like upload every mail to the IMAP server again and
duplicate them all, or erroneously delete emails.

Would my account name and the path to the Mail folder have to be the
same on B as they were on A?

Should I also copy offlineimap's metadata folder from A to B?

Are the mtimes and other file metadata of the mail files in the Mail
folder important? For example, if I commit the contents of my Mail
folder into a git repository and then make a clone of this git
repository on another computer, file metadata will not be preserved.
Will this confuse offlineimap?

Thanks




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