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

[David L. Emerson]

I've done this a couple times, and it is always a little scary. And if you don't 
do things right, offlineimap is capable of deleting lots!

Here is a pretty good checklist:

~/.offlineimaprc
metadata directory (listed in the dotfile)
all localfolders (listed in the dotfile)
anything else listed in the dotfile

When I do this, I will usually disable all of the accounts but one -- and make 
that one a small one -- and test using that one small account. Create some new 
mail, delete some mail, play around with it like you normally would, and make 
sure all is working correctly.
When I've verified all is working well, I'll enable one more account, and do a 
little more testing with that. If that's looking good, I'll go ahead and enable 
all of them, and cross my fingers.

~David.

On Mon 20 Sep 2010, seanh wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 06:11:34PM +0100, chombee wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 10:42:56AM -0400, Tim Gray wrote:
> > > On Jul 20, 2010 at 02:33 AM +0100, chombee wrote:
> > > >Ok. So I should copy the .offlineimaprc file and the .offlineimap
> > > >directory also. No problem.
> > > >
> > > >Will offlineimap do the right thing even if the hostname and username on
> > > >the new machine are different?
> > > >
> > > >Will it do the right thing if file metadata (such as modification and
> > > >creation times) of the mail files gets changed in the transfer?
> > > 
> > > I can't answer these questions definitively, but I do know that when
> > > I got a new laptop, I copied over my .offlineimap config files and
> > > the mail repository, and everything worked as before without
> > > starting from scratch.
> > 
> > Thanks. I'm going to hold out for a definitive answer for now, because I
> > sync several IMAP accounts and I don't want to make a giant mess of
> > them. Does anyone know about this?
> 
> Bump.
> 
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