Syncing Mail After Cut Over

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008, Chris Maness wrote:
>Whould it be acceptable to use rsync to sync the mail spool after using 
>dump/restore onto new hardware?  I plan on doing some testing first and 
>leave the original server up while testing, so the servers mail spool will 
>be out of sync.

This is easy if your mail stores use Maildir where each message
is in a file.  I have done it many times, including at ISPs with
tens of thousands of e-mail accounts.  We set up a new server,
create the necessary accounts on it, move all DNS to point to
that server so that clients go to the new one, then rsync over
their old $HOME directories to the new server.

It's a completely different kettle of fish if the mail stores are
in single files such as the standard BSD/Unix mail stores, U.W.
IMAP's binary format, etc.

Bill
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