On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 6:51 AM, Timothy Murphy gayleard@eircom.net wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
I have a bunch of old mail spread variously across dovecot maildirs and mbox format files on several machines that are headed for the trash. Is there anything considered to be a portable archive format for mail messages, and if so are there tools to copy into it - or do I have to pick a client and copy to its local storage?
I have a much more naive question along the same lines. Apologies if it is too far from the original query.
I'm running an IMAP (dovecot) server, with my mail stored in ~/maildir . I'm using KMail on my laptop to access the server (on another machine).
I'd like to archive some of my older email, ie transfer it to another disk on the server, but I don't understand exactly what will happen if I run Folder=>Archive Folder on my laptop, and don't like to try it without more knowledge.
Will the folder disappear from the list I see in KMail? Will the archive be saved on my laptop or on the server? In what format? Will I be able to "un-archive" it if I wish? Will the various dovecot index files be updated appropriately?
I suppose my problem basically is that I don't know how kmail on my laptop and dovecot on my server interact.
I'd expect it to ask some more questions and give you choices about those things, but you could make a new folder on the server with a few messages to experiment with. With imap, you should be able to copy/move messages back from local storage to the server or between folders on different servers if you have multiple accounts.