Migrate IMAP mailbox to cPanel

[paulmasri]

Consider this scenario: a new hosting customer wants to migrate their mailboxes from their old host to cPanel. However they've either been using an IMAP client or they've been using webmail. They have many folders set up in their mailbox. How can they do the transfer? In short, cPanel offers no support at pres

There appear to be solutions on the web for migrating IMAP mailboxes so I know it's possible. Please implement this in cPanel so that customers can click 'Transfer my mailbox from a different provider' during the mailbox creation process.

I recently encountered this problem. Actually it's been an issue ever since I became a web host 10 years ago but in this instance it wasn't an option to say "You'll lose all but your inbox." In the end, what worked was for me to create two Outlook accounts, one to connect to my customer's old mailbox and one to connect to his new cPanel mailbox. I then had to download & transfer the mail folder-by-folder. In my case I only had to migrate 1 mailbox and the person had only a handful of folders with no nesting, so it was just about manageable. That said, it still wasted a lot of time.

FYI I looked online for solutions. They exist but:
a) they require installation of other software (e.g. Perl) before you can use them
b) they suffer from mail size limit - any message over about 7MB can't be transferred
c) they require payment - given that I've paid for cPanel I expect this kind of functionality to come as standard.

I've created this post on the recommendation of cPanel support staff following a support ticket I posted. It would be great to get this supported.

If you're a WHM/cPanel user and this has been a problem for you, please add a "Me Too" post. Your 'votes' will help escalate this request.

Finally, thanks to cPanel for an otherwise good product and awesome support.

Cheers,
Paul.

[cPanelDavidG]

When you transfer a cPanel account from one server to another, all data including mail folders and mail messages, are intact. So what is this request about? Is this about migrating from a non-cPanel environment to a cPanel environment? If it's a non-cPanel environment, is the remote environment using maildir, mbox or some other format of storing mail server-side?

[paulmasri]

Sorry for not being clear enough. This is about migrating from a third party non-cPanel environment to cPanel. Often in such cases, there is little or no information about the source server setup, just access to a basic shared hosting control panel, FTP and POP/IMAP.

In these cases I presume it should be possible for one server to use the IMAP protocol to migrate a mailbox from a remote server regardless of the remote environment, so long as it supports IMAP, hence my request that cPanel provide a tool for import.

Given that adding this as a new feature is likely to take some time, if indeed it gets approved, can you offer some workarounds? I was unable to get help on this from cPanel support, who themselves suggested that I create this feature request.

[monarobase]

I think Paul is not talking about from cPanel to cPanel but to synchronise by connecting to an Imap server.

I know a few services that allow you to synchronise two imap e-mail accounts and it would definitly make things easier when moving from non cPanel where you do not have access to thé e-mail files !

As some non cPanel hosts do not give you access to the e-mail files, I give my +1 for this feature !

[ruzbehraja]

+ 1 from my side.

Yes, it is about transferring from a non-CPanel Environment, of which you may not even know the mailbox format.

Many a times the old hoster never provided a control panel to the user or the email provider does not provide website hosting and allow email management through their own control panel.

Ofcourse, the inbuilt Fetchmail feature is available in Horde, but it is not adequate.

Some improvements which maybe kept in mind are:

• Reasonable email migration limit (10 MB <)
• Options to pull multiple IMAP Folders
• Options to map folders from old to new server (Eg: Deleted Items >> Trash)

I'm sure many others are also facing this hurdle and this feature will save them loads of time and resources.

[snicho]

+1 from here too.

I see this as a fundamental requirement and can't believe that it has never been addressed.

Of the handful of clients that I have taken on hosting for so far, they have all needed their mailboxes brought across from third party providers. A search found a few PHP solutions (eg. imapsync) that others have implemented to achieve this. These include some basic features to fail gracefully if connections are lost, or to log messages that do not import for whatever reason. All of these solutions that I found require shell access.

Maintaining the integrity of the folders, date/time stamps and even message status (un/read, forwarded, etc), appear to be a challenge.

Another option I found is a few hosted services. But these are paid services that provide varying promises of compatibility.

Where I've imported mailboxes for clients to date, I've gone via an email client (Thunderbird or Outlook). I've set up the account, downloaded a local copy of the whole inbox, including folder structure, then uploaded it to the new mailbox.

The two biggest downsides to this approach are time and bandwidth usage. It also only handles one mailbox at a time for each user on a given domain.

It would be great to see an option built into cPanel that could directly import the contents of a third party IMAP account, given the IMAP server address and user logon details. And, unless there's a better technical solution, have the facility to queue these as jobs for each mailbox that needs to be imported.

So, yes please ...

+1

- Stephen

[jethrodesign]

+1. This not being easy causes some clients to consider not using our hosting platform for their new sites. That's not ideal.

[Branko]

1 on this to

There is a imapsync package installable via yum on latest centos distros.
It can also be installed from source on any linux box.

Usage is simple:

imapsync --host1 OLDMAILSERVER.TLD --user1 USER@DOMAIN.TLD --password1 PASSWORD --authmech1 LOGIN --host2 DESTINATIONSERVER.TLD --ssl2 --authmech2 PLAIN  --user2 USER@DOMENA.TLD --password2 PASSWORD

Look at the man page for more info.

Would be nice too if this could be in bulk.
for example importing csv list of mail accounts, origin server names, passwords and other relevant info.

[succeed.net]

+ 1 Have need of this.

Have used IMAP SYnc in the past but for large migrations it would be great to have this built in.