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IMAP Tools for migrating email accounts

I wrote some tools to help with migrating an existing imap account from one server to another, so that you can keep your emails when you switch your domain name to a new provider. I think normally your email client might do this for you automatically just by you changing the server settings, but I have some users only using a webmail client, meaning they don’t have a local copy to sync to the new server. Plus it’s always good to have a backup.

To solve this I wrote some scripts that let me download an entire mailbox and then reupload it to a new server. You can find them here: https://github.com/Tethik/imap-tools

I initially intended to use these for migrating a domain name and the email to a new provider. Unfortunately I never got to carry out the migration, so I only got to try this out with some test accounts. The way I imagine the whole process of moving email servers with a domain name looks something like this:

  1. Download all accounts and their emails locally using my script.
  2. Do the domain transfer.
  3. Set up the new imap accounts at the new provider.
  4. Use the upload script for each account to upload all old emails to the new accounts.