fetchmail and mbox migration

[Andrew Moore]

On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 11:49:38AM -0500, darkweb4 wrote:
> I might be inheriting an older compaq from my mother when I
> get her new computer built.  I was thinking that I could use
> it as a mail server.  I have dial up.  Will I be able to
> have a mail server without a persistant IP address?  (and
> yes, i know that i'd better check with my ISP first about
> policy on personal mail servers)  If not, i'd at least like
> to use fetchmail or something similar to download my email
> to a central location.  However, I already have 30-40 megs
> stored in mbox format on another computer.  How would I go
> about migrating the existing email into whatever format the
> mail server/fetchmail will use?  Also, what are some
> recomendations for different mail servers?

You can use a mailserver without a persistant address in one of a few
ways. One is to run fetchmail on it to fetch your mail off of whereever
it actually gets delivered, like your ISP's mailserver. For outgoing
mail, you either use them as a "smart host" or you hope that they allow
you to send mail out directly from your machine (which some don't and if
they do then some people think you are a spammer because you come from a
dynamic IP address).

Another could be to use some kind of dynamic DNS setup, like dynodns.net
or dyndns.org or something. I haven't tried this in years, but some
people have limited success with it. Some dynamic DNS providers will let
you use their mailservers as a secondary or something.

I have always thought this this post:

http://www.kclug.org/message.php?l=kclug&b=200304&m=1051281871

descrived a rather handy way to move mailboxes from one mail server to
another. I guess it depends on you having more than just POP or IMAP
access to the old mailserver, though. Otherwise, I guess I'd use
fetchmail to pull them all off of the old one and feed them to the new
mailserver.

Since I started running debian, I learned postfix and have found it to
be better in some ways than sendmail, but in some regards this is closer
than I like to venture to the "religion and politics" threshold I like
to see on this list.

Hope it helps!

-Andy