I’ve been using mbsync for exactly this reason for years. It’s sort of finicky to set up, but it works really well for pulling and pushing IMAP mail around.
Thank you for this! I’m moving IMAP hosts next month, and I was tearing my hair out trying to get ‘doveadm’ playing nicely. This is far more straightforward.
Well… maybe not so fast. My use-case is such that I want to pull from IMAP Server 1 and copy to IMAP Server 2. getmail seems to support only pulling from IMAP Server 1 and copying to a local folder. Troubleshooting why I couldn’t get that to work led me to the Python3-compatible getmail6 fork - https://getmail6.org/ - which has the same limitation, and to the older-but-works-for-my-use-case tool ‘imapsync’ - https://imapsync.lamiral.info
imapsync did what I needed it to do, with similarly-straightforward setup. So… even though getmail didn’t quite work for me, thanks for sending me down a pleasant 20-minute rabbit-hole which eventually led to me solving my problem instead of continuing to bash my head against doveadm’s way of doing things! :-)
Lots of email hosts have special features that don’t map perfectly to IMAP concepts, making migration seriously hard. I specifically remember the doveadm docs warning somewhere that sync isn’t reliable except between 2 dovecot servers for that reason. The docs on syncing with gmail illustrate some of these problems.
I’ve been using
mbsyncfor exactly this reason for years. It’s sort of finicky to set up, but it works really well for pulling and pushing IMAP mail around.+1 for mbsync. Incredibly powerful, especially the ability to control how propagation happens (master -> slave, or vice versa).
Thank you for this! I’m moving IMAP hosts next month, and I was tearing my hair out trying to get ‘doveadm’ playing nicely. This is far more straightforward.
Well… maybe not so fast. My use-case is such that I want to pull from IMAP Server 1 and copy to IMAP Server 2. getmail seems to support only pulling from IMAP Server 1 and copying to a local folder. Troubleshooting why I couldn’t get that to work led me to the Python3-compatible getmail6 fork - https://getmail6.org/ - which has the same limitation, and to the older-but-works-for-my-use-case tool ‘imapsync’ - https://imapsync.lamiral.info
imapsync did what I needed it to do, with similarly-straightforward setup. So… even though getmail didn’t quite work for me, thanks for sending me down a pleasant 20-minute rabbit-hole which eventually led to me solving my problem instead of continuing to bash my head against doveadm’s way of doing things! :-)
Lots of email hosts have special features that don’t map perfectly to IMAP concepts, making migration seriously hard. I specifically remember the doveadm docs warning somewhere that sync isn’t reliable except between 2 dovecot servers for that reason. The docs on syncing with gmail illustrate some of these problems.
Thanks for the reply, and good luck for your migration!