GoDaddy now offers Exchange e-mail hosting. So I decided to try to move from my IMAP e-mail provider to Exchange. Migrating all of my e-mails was difficult. I tried..

• Copying each folder through drag and drop in both Outlook and Thunderbird. Outlook occasionally locked up. And Thunderbird did recursively copy correctly and sometimes when it came across an email it couldn’t handle, it would go into a download message loop.
• Using the IMAPCopy program. It didn’t work for me and had problems with some of my emails and threw errors. Furthermore, if something happened and it got disconnected then I ended up having to find where it left off and continue otherwise it would recopy everything and make duplicates.
• Using imapsync perl script. This was a nightmare for me to try and setup and configure because it doesn’t support the most recent version of the perl IMAPClient class. Furthermore the dates didn’t sync correctly and it threw errors which I didn’t want to have to deal with and I got fed up with it.

The way I got all my emails migrated was..

Forcing Outlook to download the full e-mails from my IMAP server and using the resulting .PST to import my emails into the Exchange server. It was so much simpler and less prone to importation error. It was also a lot quicker than any of the scripts that I tried.

Also I would recommend this other post on changing when a message is marked read.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Troubleshoot, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.