Migrate from vpopmail to DA

srelliott

srelliott

Verified User
Joined
Apr 6, 2005
Messages
44
Hello,

We are currently using vpopmail and need to migrate as seamlessly as possible to DirectAdmin.

Please point me to any information you have on this subject.

We are especially concerned about transferring current email and pop accounts with passwords to DA from vpopmail. We do not want to have to contact each client and each user of each client to setup a new password.

We also want to as easily as possible copy over all existing email from the old system to the new system.

--
Shannon
 
I got an email answer from John, I'll let you know how it goes and what I ran into. Here his response:

Hello,

We use vm-pop3d. Email accounts are stored in /etc/virtual/domain.com/passwd, where the format is:
user1: cryptedpass
user2: cryptedpass2
..

where "cryptedpass" is generated using the standard crypte("plaintextpass","salt"); format. If you already have crypted password, re-encryption shouldn't be required. Restore this data *after* the domain has been created through DA.

As for emails themselves, the mailboxes are in mbox format.
virtual pop account inboxes are stored in /var/spool/virtual/domain.com/user

The login format is [email protected] with their password.

Imap is also supported if needed. The account list is the same, as is the main inbox. Additional mailboxes for the pop account are stored in /home/username/imap/domain.com/user/mail/*

System email accounts use the same login/pass as for DA, and the mail is stored in /var/spool/mail/username.

That's about all there is to it ;)

Thank you,

John
 
Automated Solution to convert vpopmail to exim mbox format.

Well folks,

After hanging out here a month and asking a few questions, I decided it was time to give back to the community.

I created a Perl script solution that worked nicely for me.

The scripts automatically created the pop and alias accounts ( no mailing lists ) and all the existing email to the new server.

You can download and modify the scripts for your own purposes.

Best wishes,

Shannon
 
Re: Automated Solution to convert vpopmail to exim mbox format.

srelliott said:
Well folks,

After hanging out here a month and asking a few questions, I decided it was time to give back to the community.

I created a Perl script solution that worked nicely for me.

The scripts automatically created the pop and alias accounts ( no mailing lists ) and all the existing email to the new server.

You can download and modify the scripts for your own purposes.

Best wishes,

Shannon
Click to expand...


Hello Shannon,


When using your script: mail-vpop2exim.pl

We encounter the error:

Out of memory during "large" request for 268439552 bytes, total sbrk() is 478996480 bytes at ./mail-vpop2exim.pl line 64


This persons mailbox has a lot of large images in it apparently.

But it looks like it could have something to do with how your script is looping over things as well.
 
Also... what about the .Sent .Draft and .Trash folders? Is the script supposed to process these as well?

Example of folders on the old server:

drwx------ 5 vpopmail vchkpw 512 Aug 3 12:53 .Drafts
drwx------ 5 vpopmail vchkpw 512 Dec 21 15:00 .Sent
drwx------ 5 vpopmail vchkpw 512 Jun 30 2002 .Sent.2002.04-Apr
drwx------ 5 vpopmail vchkpw 512 Jun 30 2002 .Sent.2002.05-May
drwx------ 5 vpopmail vchkpw 512 Jun 30 2002 .Sent.2002.06-Jun
drwx------ 5 vpopmail vchkpw 512 Jul 9 2002 .Sent.2002.07-Jul
drwx------ 5 vpopmail vchkpw 512 Aug 7 2002 .Sent.2002.08-Aug
drwx------ 5 vpopmail vchkpw 512 Sep 4 2002 .Sent.2002.09-Sep
drwx------ 5 vpopmail vchkpw 512 Oct 9 2002 .Sent.2002.10-Oct
drwx------ 5 vpopmail vchkpw 512 Jan 17 10:25 .Trash
 
Last edited:
After closer inspection, it looks like your script is pulling all of the files folders (including .Sent .Drafts .Trash etc) off of the old server, but it is not trying to recreate these on the new server.
 
And wow.. this sucks.

Look how huge these files in /usr/local/spool/virtual/domain.com are:

-rw-rw---- 1 domain mail 120638870 Jan 23 15:36 ccp

Doesn't this make for slower mail handling than the Maildir format?
 
Hi Atari,

Yes, the script processes all of the folders and puts all of the messages into the "inbox" of the mbox file. It doesn't try to create the different folders, because this was beyond the scope of what I hoped to accomplish in a short time. Frankly, I contacted all of our clients and asked them to POP their accounts and clean out anything they didn't want some time before switching over. Please feel free to update the script to create the additional folders for the mbox format. Simply put, it was more work than it was worth and as it turned out, our customers were fine with just getting their email.

As for the error you're encountering, I never saw that error message, and I transferred mailboxes with a little over 100 megs each. Frankly, I don't know what's causing this.

As for the mbox format, it is what it is, I didn't pick it, as neither did you. From our experience it runs just fine on our new system, which has loads of speed and typically runs with a load of .04 with over 1000 mailboxes being checked regularly.

If you figure out a fix for the bug you've encountered, please post it here for others who might run into the same issue.

Best wishes,

Shannon
 
srelliott said:

As for the error you're encountering, I never saw that error message, and I transferred mailboxes with a little over 100 megs each. Frankly, I don't know what's causing this.

As for the mbox format, it is what it is, I didn't pick it, as neither did you. From our experience it runs just fine on our new system, which has loads of speed and typically runs with a load of .04 with over 1000 mailboxes being checked regularly.

If you figure out a fix for the bug you've encountered, please post it here for others who might run into the same issue.

Best wishes,

Shannon
Click to expand...


Hi Shannon,

Thanks for the fast reply.

Be sure to vote in this thread:
http://www.directadmin.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6701

You probably have already :)



As far as the error goes, I'm not sure what is causing it either. All I know is if I removed a couple of the largest files from the persons directory - it was able to complete.

So that was my very hacky fix.

I'm not sure if it was the content of the message that was causing it to loop or run out of memory, or if it was the # and size of the messages themselves.




As far as our adventures with DA go, I think we are about to give this DA dovecot conversion a try (uses Maildir!), and if it doesn't work, we're done with DA and control panels in general.
 
Hi Atari,

No, I hadn't seen the voting link before, thanks.

Good luck on the conversion. I know it was a very painfull 3 month process for us. However, it turned out to be well worth the pain and effort.

We really like DA and so do the numerous customers who've told us they like it as well. We haven't had one complaint from anyone about it and lots of "Thanks" for installing it. It was going to be a pain migrating the customers from old to new the server no matter what we did. Can you say over 500 websites to consider.... Ouch! The system runs very well and fast ( mainly due to big bucks spent on hardware. )

Best of luck,

Shannon
 
Ufortunately for us, we're getting a ton of complaints from people not being able to access their mail, address books, send mail, and more.

It's been a horrible week for us.

No response from DA support yet on what our options are. I guess they are done for the day.

I'm about an hour away from dumping this whole idea.

Luckily we still have the old server online and preserved as it was a few days ago.
 
Yeah Atari,

That is a good thing. They way we did it, was we brought up the new server, transferred a user over with their domains. Made sure it was working locally, then updated the DNS to point to the new server.

After that, we ran a cron job for 15 days that updated the email automatically from the old server to the new. I know it's suppose to be only 7-10 days for DNS to update worldwide, but we were still getting email from legitimate sources 14 days out.

So, we slowly transferred one by one and verified each before making them live on the new server.

Maybe something to consider....
 
srelliott said:
Yeah Atari,

Maybe something to consider....
Click to expand...

We have a failing hard drive on the machine we are moving from & didn't want to get a new server with the old hosting company.

We did have a good week to move things around, but the problems started when the old server (which hosted NS1) kept crashing, causing it to fall over to the new server using DirectAdmin (which hosted NS2).

If the old server wasn't crashing, we probably wouldn't have as much of a mess as we do now :(
 
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