I wanted to drag this thread back to life because it is still unanswered and I have been having extensive issues with a 10.2 to 10.4 e-mail migration myself.

I work for a mac dealer in the uk, we undertook a 10.2 to 10.4 server migration on behalf of a client expecting the process to be relatively painless.. oh how wrong I was.

The client in question has 25 e-mail accounts (IMAP) ranging from 1000-10,000 messages spanning complex folder trees so ‘drag n drop’ copy is out of the question.

I started out by reading the Apple guide on migration, this made it all sound very easy with typical minimalist instruction along the lines of go to the mail migration bit in Server Admin, select your old mail database, click migrate.

So I migrated my users so their were accounts ready to receive the information as instructed and proceeded with the guided instructions on using amsmailtool through the Server Admin GUI.

This failed miserably. attempts to run the amsmailtool by hand from a terminal also failed badly, some dubious logging was also produced prooving the ineffectiveness of this tool, results were time consuming and alarmingly variable.

I went to Apple for help with this tool, and drew a blank.. great.

so. our client still wants their stuff sorting.. where do we go from here.. time to explorer 3rd party migration options.

the two best were ‘offlineimap’ which is a python tool, the other imapsync wrriten in perl.

First up, offlineimap, because imapsync had perl module problems I didnt want to waste time trying to figure out.

initially this looked promising, but random messages would cause it to bomb out of operation requiring manual deletion, it quickly became apparent this was not a reliable solution, although it created all folders succesfully and did copy some messages to the destination 10.4 server.

so.. imapsync, this turned out to be a really good tool with a host of options and up to date development, so initially it looked promising.

I initially tested it on two seperate mail systems I have full faith in, both running custom exim and courier setups configured by hand, it worked perfectly copying a full set of IMAP folders and messages and logging accordingly, it even supports a .csv for block migration so this was all looking great.

so.. I tryed to run this tool over the 10.2 and 10.4 servers with the relevant information expecting a result at long last… but imapsync although connecting to the 10.2 and 10.4 systems and correctly identifying the folders failed to calculate the correct number of messages in each folder on the 10.2 system and failed to calculate the size of each folder, it then proceeds to finish without error but without copying any messages, as it worked perfectly on other systems I can only point at the IMAP capabilitys of the 10.2 system.
(The scan of number of messages and folder size was accurate for the 10.4 server.)

This yet again seems to be a case of Apple not bothering to properly equip their migration path with tools and documention and weird backend customisation of open source products making things very difficult to go 3rd party.

I still have no working solution for this problem, if anyone has any comments or ideas I would be very intrested to hear them 🙂