NNML => NNIMAP migration (and IMAP server recommendations. :)

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

I am in the position of /almost/ always wanting to access my email on my
local machine. /Almost/, though, is not quite always, which has been a
pain on a couple of occasions recently.

So, to address this, I would like to migrate from my current NNML-based
mail setup to an IMAP based setup.

This has the obvious advantage of being agnostic to the mail client used
while retaining almost all the functionality of NNML.

My current plan is to use Cyrus-IMAP as the server backend (on the local
machine, with one user). Has anyone a recommendation against using this
tool?

The U-Washington IMAP server is not interesting (doesn't scale) and
Courier is a little problematic in terms of accepting 8-bit bodies and
so forth.[1]


As part of this migration, I need to move my current mail collection
into the server I chose. This /needs/ to preserve the flagged and unread
articles in my current NNML spool.

My spool currently contains ~ 100,000 messages, all of which I want to
preserve in their current group and flagged/read/unread state during the
transition.

After using 'B c' (for testing) to spool 2,200 articles into IMAP, I am
more than a little afraid of the time it will take to do this migration
in Gnus. My estimate is ~ 48 hours, maybe more.

So, any suggestions for dealing with that issue?

        Daniel


Footnotes: 
[1]  This is based on issues encountered at my place of work while they
     were testing Courier. I am happy to hear this dismissed.

-- 
In the present-day reconstruction of physics, fragments of the Newtonian
concepts are stubbornly retained. The result is to reduce modern physics to a
sort of mystic chant over an unintelligible universe.
        -- Alfred North Whitehead, _Modes of Thought_