Re: POP to IMAP

[Lute Kamstra <Lute.Kamstra@cwi.nl>]

Xavier Maillard <zedek@gnu-rox.org> writes:

> As the subject line say, I am about to migrate all my data from POP3
> to IMAP mail protocol.
>
> Does anyone know if there are difficulties to achieve such a task ?

I just migrated from POP to IMAP and I encountered three problems.

Firstly, if you use nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent and still have your
old POP (nnfolder) mail groups lying around, Gnus recognizes if new
mails refer to a mail you have in you old archive, but tries to split
them into a mailbox on the IMAP server with the same name as the group
the parent is in on the old backend.  This is temporary, but can be a
bit confusing at first.

Secondly, I had a few problems with moving my nnfolder mail archive to
the IMAP server; approximately one in 500 messages could not be
copied.  I got several error messages.  A few were caused by incorrect
headers (which you can just delete by editing the message), but most
errors were due to non ASCII characters in the message bodies.
Especially, the \201 character seemed to cause trouble.  What usually
helped was first moving the message to the same nnfolder group is was
already in and then trying to copy it to the IMAP server.  If that
didn't work, editing a message (e) and saving it (C-c C-c) worked for
me as it removed the troublesome characters.

Thirdly, it took quite some time to move all my archived messages to
the IMAP server.  I had to go into every group (C-u RET), select all
messages (M P b), and move (B m) them an IMAP group.  With the number
of mail groups I accumulated over the years, this took quit some time.
I would be nice if there were an easier way to do this.  Maybe there
is, but I just don't know about it.

Lute.

-- 
Lute Kamstra  <Lute.Kamstra@cwi.nl>
CWI  department PNA4
Room M233  phone (+31) 20 592 4214
[Echelon material: Compsec White Water Ceridian]