How to migrated an external Maildir account into Mailcow?

kantamaru267

I have a backup of one of my email accounts in the Maildir format. I made it manually, and it’s not from a Mailcow instance.

How to import it into a Mailcow? Will I also have to create a domain and mailbox for it first?

I’m aware of the 2 import/export bash scripts of Mailcow, however, can they be used in this case?

kantamaru267

up up

maybl8

I may be wrong with this but I think you can use Thunderbird to do this. I think I did this a while back but don’t remember the exact instructions.
Maybe someone else here can guide you better.

ThiSchwa

You should create a sync-job in the mailcow-ui, in email -> configuration -> synchronisation.
Sorry, I don’t know the correct wording, I used a german localized version.

DocFraggle

@kantamaru267 I think you can just copy the files over to your newly created mailbox directory

The mailboxes are located (in my case) at

/var/lib/docker/volumes/mailcowdockerized_vmail-vol-1/_data/

the actual mailbox dir is located at domain/user/Maildir/

Maybe try it first with a test mailbox

kantamaru267

DocFraggle let me try
have you done it?

simply copy? or will I have to prepare the domains and mailboxes first by creating them via the UI?

DocFraggle

kantamaru267 yes you have to create the domains and mailboxes before copying the files

I dind’t try this myself as I migrated from an existing mailserver and used the sync jobs to sync the mailboxes.
Basically it should be the same as the restore script does while restoring a vmail backup.

What you have to do after copying the files is to run the “Encrypt /var/vmail” part you can find here: https://docs.mailcow.email/manual-guides/Dovecot/u_e-dovecot-mail-crypt/
This will encrypt and compress your imported mails afterwards

Maybe try it first with a simple test mailbox

DocFraggle

As I learned today that won’t work out of the box as the mails are crypted and compressed. You will need to do that manually

https://docs.mailcow.email/manual-guides/Dovecot/u_e-dovecot-mail-crypt/

kantamaru267

DocFraggle have you ever done it?

chriss

If you’re comfortable with the command line, you can look at rick sanders imap tools

There’s a maildir to imap script which could do what you want and the tools are pretty easy to use.

kantamaru267

thx, will try