<DKIM> Maildir -> Restore to IMAP server

[Pluto Crat]

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for your very clear and thorough instructions. All is good now, 
and hopefully anyone else having a similar problem will be able to find 
the answer in this mailing list! Perhaps one for the FAQ?

While I'm writing, I thought I'd mention how I got in this position in 
the first place. I have an account with Mediatemple. I was hosting a 
domain for a friend, and wanted to transfer it from my account to his 
account. However it was impossible to set up the domain on both accounts 
at the same time, so I needed to make a copy of his email, delete the 
account on the source end, and then create it on the target end. It was 
frustrating because I knew that if I talked to the right tech person, 
they could just move the maildir between accounts. If I'd had access to 
the server myself, I could have done it in seconds, rather than the 6 
hours it took me to make a local copy and re-upload it. Ah well. Its all 
over now.

Thanks again. And thanks for offlineimap.

On Tuesday, 23 December, 2014 12:05 AM, Nicolas Sebrecht wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 05:23:04PM +0800, Plutocrat wrote:
>
> <...>
>
>> So I looked in the FAQ and saw that the answer lay in the cached
>> information. However the solution is to delete the contents of the
>> maildir and cache, which is not what I want to do as this is now the
>> only copy of the mail!
> Not true, AFAIR. While this is the strong way, deleting the cache is
> enough. It might be worth to make a backup of the maildir before
> proceeding, though.
>
>> So ... what is the correct way to get these mails from the Local
>> maildir copy into the new IMAP account? The account owner is standing
>> behind me tapping his foot, so I need to figure it out swiftly!
> The best way is to let OfflineIMAP recreate its cache according to the
> new server, from scratch.
>
> 1. Move the maildir directory to maildir.old. Create a new empty
>     maildir directory.
>
> 2. Delete the cache. OfflineIMAP is now ready to start from scratch as
>     if it was its first execution.
>
> 3. Run OfflineIMAP once. Now, it has a clean cache and a fresh maildir
>     content.
>
> 4. Then, we want to copy the content (your raw mails) from maildir.old to
>     maildir. Compare the trees between the old and new maildir before
>     copying.
>
> Depending of what was done while migrating the IMAP server, your might
> find the exact same trees or not. If not, there two alternatives:
> - tune your OfflineIMAP configuration to have the new tree matching the
>    old one. This requires deleting the maildir and re-sync to not have
>    unexpected upload sync due to changed nametrans rules or whatever.
>    This is the hard way.
> or
> - manually copy the emails from the old maildir to the new maildir on a
>    per-folder basis. This should be the easy way.
>
> 5. Re-sync. The local mails are synced back to the server.
>