You are hereMigration to Google Apps for your domain
Migration to Google Apps for your domain
I took the decision to migrate my mails to Google Apps for your domain.
Some nice things are already activated and working fine and documented.
As expected similar migrations always bring some issues with them, but this time I wanted to do everything just right.
That's why I started working on a Q & A section. When writing questions I came across a 'I was only using webmail. How do I migrate the mails from the old webmail to the new system?' question.
I immediately starting writing instructions to setup gmail to download pop messages from another server to the gmail account. (you can find this in the 'Settings' > 'Account' page)
Unfortunately this option is not available with the 'apps for your domain' system. I thus had to find a way to transfer all the mails from server A to server B (google).
Using imap to transfer mails was not possible as Google does not support this. A guess brought me on a fetchmail documentation quest. Browsing the website I became more and more excited when I came across this phrase in the FAQ: "Q: How can I forward mail to another host? A:To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running fetchmail on, use the smtphost or smtpname option. See the manual page for details."
After a few minutes I created this little script to do the work for me:
Edit: added links below
Usefull links are:
Some nice things are already activated and working fine and documented.
As expected similar migrations always bring some issues with them, but this time I wanted to do everything just right.
That's why I started working on a Q & A section. When writing questions I came across a 'I was only using webmail. How do I migrate the mails from the old webmail to the new system?' question.
I immediately starting writing instructions to setup gmail to download pop messages from another server to the gmail account. (you can find this in the 'Settings' > 'Account' page)
Unfortunately this option is not available with the 'apps for your domain' system. I thus had to find a way to transfer all the mails from server A to server B (google).
Using imap to transfer mails was not possible as Google does not support this. A guess brought me on a fetchmail documentation quest. Browsing the website I became more and more excited when I came across this phrase in the FAQ: "Q: How can I forward mail to another host? A:To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running fetchmail on, use the smtphost or smtpname option. See the manual page for details."
After a few minutes I created this little script to do the work for me:
#!/bin/bash
PROTO="POP3"
SMTPHOST="ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM"
SERVER="vandeplas.com"
USERS="christophe familymember2 familymember3"
for user in ${USERS}; do
fetchmail -v -p ${PROTO} --smtphost ${SMTPHOST}\
--smtpname ${user}@${SERVER}.test-google-a.com -u ${user}@${SERVER} ${SERVER}
done;
Migration, here I come :-)Edit: added links below
Usefull links are:
- Gmail Loader - http://marklyon.org/gmail/
- Gmail Loader instructions for Mac OS X - http://paskal.net/gmail_loader_instructions_for_mac_os_x/
- Migrating IMAP mail to Google - http://www.rickroot.com/blog/1/2007/01/MigratingImporting-IMAP-email-to-...
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From: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=56449
Why does my 'Sent Mail' get downloaded to my POP inbox?
When you enable POP, all messages are downloaded to your client, except for Spam, Trash, and Chats. If you don't want messages that you send from the web interface downloaded to your mail client's inbox, we suggest creating a filter within your client.
Google Apps really seems like an interesting proposition -- if you can live with the fact that all your mail will be stored on the servers of a giant American corporation (which I can, btw :-) -- and handled by a large stack of non-free software on top of Linux.
I read news some time ago that Google Apps would cease to be free, but as usual it was more hype than fact. They only offer a "Premier Edition" with larger inboxes and a SLA for money.
Good luck with the transfer!
The script can be run on any machine having fetchmail installed. It will connect using POP3 to the old server and then forward the mail to the google servers. That's all.
After browsing the web a bit more I discovered it is not possible to disable this behavior.
Usefull links are: