Converting All Your MS Outlook PST Files To Maildir Format - Page 2

Move mail from your PST files to your IMAP folders

Since you may have various PST files, you could create several folders (or directories) on your IMAP account, and move your e-mail into these folders. Here is how to easily create a folder and move your e-mail into it. First, make sure the "Inbox" folder on your IMAP connection is selected and right click to select the "New folder..." option:

Next you pick a name for your new folder:

And you are now ready to put some mail into the new folder:

Finally, you now need to move your e-mail to the new folder. Go to one of your PST folders, and select all the e-mail. Then right click on the selected e-mail and select "Move to folder...":

Select your newly created IMAP folder from the list and click the "Ok" button:

That's it - your done!

In your IMAP folders on the Linux server, you should now be able to list your e-mail files:

$ ls /opt/imap-mail/peanut/Maildir/.Old_Mail/cur/

1180237973.M497239P8678V0000000000000801I0037C569_0.peanut-desktop,S=8866:2,S
1180237973.M812137P8678V0000000000000801I0037C56A_1.peanut-desktop,S=6129:2,S
1180237973.M883276P8678V0000000000000801I0037C56C_2.peanut-desktop,S=6981:2,S
   .
   .
   .

Configuring your new mail Linux mail client (KMail) to access your IMAP folders

Finally you need to configure your new Linux e-mail client to access your IMAP folders. I use KMail here as an example, but you could really use any client that support IMAP.

When you start KMail for the first time, you will need to create an account:

You need to select the IMAP account type:

And you need to complete your details:

And now you enter your log on credentials:

Now enter the IMAP server details:

We now have all the required information to connect to our IMAP folders. When KMail start, you may not immediately see your IMAP folder. In the account set-up, ensure that the mail client retrieves the mail from the server at start-up:

And finally, we have access to our converted folder(s):

Final notes on e-mail clients and IMAP folders : In many cases you will need to "subscribe" to online folders. You will notice in the KMail example above I only subscribed to ONE of the folders I created. Similar concepts exists in most mail clients.

Conclusion and References

Hopefully this high level HOWTO could lay the foundation for a MS Exchange migration strategy for individuals and businesses wishing to move away from MS Outlook. There are commercial PST conversion tools available, but using IMAP has the added advantage that you can already integrate into your new mail environment. On the SMTP back-end, it's simply a question of replacing the Exchange SMTP component with a Linux based SMTP server, which would then start to populate your IMAP folders. In theory, your desktop users would then have a seamless migration from MS Exchange.

So many of you might be asking where to from here. Well, here are some pointers (all links open in a new window/tab):