This is the homepage for perfect_maildir.pl, a "Simple but Perfect" mbox to Maildir converter by Philip Mak .
Changelog is available here.
Download the tool here and read the README provided. Usage is pretty simple so it can be used in any script to parse a lot of mailboxes
./perfect_maildir.pl path_to_Maildir/ < mboxDefault settings can be modified at the top of the script
Some contrib scripts or patches could me reached here (some are merged in the v0.3 as of 10/31/2004).
This tool was used in the following circumstances (please send me a mail if you had a successful use of this tool, I will add it to the story;-)) :
Of course, performance information is really dependant to hardware, but it gives you an idea of the time needed to do the migration.
RedHat 9.0, Dual 1Ghz CPU's, 1GB RAM. 864 users, 676444 messages, 4700 folders, 5978 seconds (as reported by perfect_maildir). Total real time in the mailbox conversion was about 5 hours, but I was also gzipping the old mboxes after each conversion. I have no idea what storage size of the email was, but the gzipped versions (at the default compression level) increased my disk usage on that partition by 10GB to 36GB. That partition holds all of the user's files (they don't have shells, so they shouldn't have much), including their webpages. Enclosed is the script I used to drive perfect_maildir, along with a script that I wrote to unconvert if necessary (it wasn't). Complaints included: * "My folders are all under my INBOX now" - while there were a number of complaints about this, there was really only one user affected by this, as he had set up numerous message filters that were attempting to deliver to the wrong folder * "Netscape complains when I try to send messages" - this was for /Netscape/ users, not Mozilla. The problem was similar to the message filters in that the Sent folder was now a subfolder of the INBOX. I'm not sure why Moz users didn't have problems, but... * "All of my old messages are showing up with the same date/time" - This one seemed to generally clear itself up after they re-reloaded their mail folders. The date and time were those of the conversion. I still have one user that the date/time stamps are still messed up. * "My folders aren't showing up in Netscape/Mozilla" - um... yeah... click on the plus sign next to INBOX... All in all, a great migration considering the scope of the changes (mbox->maildir, UW->Courier). I performed the migration on Saturday. Right now is a very quiet time for us, so there may be more problems lurking, but... Thanks for sharing your script...
We were migrating a number of domains off of a couple of old Ensim managed-hosting servers, and moving mail to our Postfix machine. We had to migrate a number of Squirrelmail instances, averaging a 10-20 MB inbox, to our main mailserver. The script did the trick, and quickly - and it handled the output from an mbx-mbox conversion we had to do from some of the accounts just as handily. This script saved a major headache, and it'll be added to my toolbelt for when we have to migrate other servers in the future.