A quick technical note… I just want to get this down so it’s findable later.
I was trying to move my mail from FASnet to the new Zimbra server. The Zimbra wiki suggests imapsync to migrate mail from one IMAP server to another.
When I tried that, imapsync insists on spidering every folder on the source server to see what’s there. Since FASnet is set up in its own particular fashion, that means it will look through every file in my home directory. That’s a lot of load on the IMAP server and something that caused the system admins to ask me nicely to stop.
To prevent the spidering, I replaced this line in the imapsync script:
my @all_source_folders = sort $from->folders();
with this:
my @all_source_folders = ();
As long as you specify a --folderrec (or --folder or --subscribed) and no --include, it will still work just fine. My command line was:
./imapsync --host1 imap.css.sfu.ca --user1 ggbaker --host2 imapserver.sfu.ca --user2 ggbaker --noauthmd5 --folderrec mail --exclude old --prefix1 mail --prefix2 fasnet 2>&1 | tee log
Everything seemed to work, and it looks like I have my email moved over. The line in the imapsync summary “Total bytes skipped: 36444” worries me a little. I wonder what those bytes were.