Server-Side Changes

Server-side change must be done by PCS staff on the primary mail store, as that is the only system that has access to email stored in the old mbox format.

The conversion process is facilitated by a Perl script, mb2md.pl, written elsewhere and a local wrapper script, mbox2maildir, that calls mb2md.pl appropriately for the local environment.

The appropriate sequence is generally as follows:

1. Log in to helios-store.
2. Switch user identity to the user whose email is to be converted.
3. Create a Maildir directory in the user's home directory if one does not already exist.
4. Update Procmail delivery rules to ensure all new deliveries are made into the Maildir directory.
5. Switch into the user's Maildir directory, run the conversion script and await completion.

As a series of commands, if we are converting email for imaginary user ted, this will look similar to:

$ ssh root@helios-store

$ su - ted

$ mkdir -p Maildir

$ bogosetup -t Maildir

$ mbox2maildir

The conversion will take a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on the size of the user's mailboxes. At this point, the user ted now needs to reconfigure his email clients (eg. Thunderbird, Outlook, Evolution, Pine) to look at the new server to fetch email.