[Users] Importing kmails complete mail corpus to claws

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 22 May 2013 12:48:17 -0400
Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:

> Greetings all;
> 
> I would like to be able to do this so that kmail remains intact and
> usable until I have claws configured close enough to kmail that claws
> can take over with no gaps in the timeline.

Hi Gene,

I can't help you with a cutover that remains parallel. The way I
emigrated from Kmail involved a sharp cutover with a few
dayshttp://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/201202/201202.htm of email
downtime. I did this after months of investigating the best way of 
doing it. Here are the details:

http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/201202/201202.htm

Basically, I got Dovecot running on my desktop machine. I grab my email
with fetchmail, which shoots each message to procmail for deposit in
the proper Dovecot email folder. So all my email is in Dovecot, *not*
in my email client. That way, if at a later date Claws-Mail goes and
does something stupid the way Kmail did (Akonadi, etc), then I can drop
in any IMAP aware email client. I find it very reassuring to separate
email creation and reading from email storage, and will never again
store my email in an email client's format.

So my conversion required me to get my local Dovecot running, and then,
one at a time, within kmail I copied my folders to equivalent IMAP
folders in Dovecot. I could have copied whole folder trees, but IMHO
you'll have less problems if you don't copy excessively big trees.
During the conversion I could receive no email. I wanted my IMAP tree
to exactly match my Kmail tree. My records showed I sent my last Kmail
email at 2:35am on 2/3/2012, and sent my first Claws email at 12:48pm
on 2/4/2012, so I was down for a day and a half.

HTH,

SteveT