[ntsc]

I'm hoping to get some help with a migration project to Mac OS X 10.5 Server's mail server from another mail server. One of the main tasks is going to be migrating our archived mail from the old system to the Server's mail server. To do this I need to know what format Apple has chosen to store messages in with its mail server. As far as I can tell the messages are stored as individual files at /var/spool/imap/<username>/<folder> but I can't find any documentation about the format itself.

According to the docs it looks like Cyrus does this storage under the hood, has Apple changed any of this to suit the configuration Leopard Server or does it work just like Cyrus? There are also a bunch of databases kicking around which handle what appear to be some basic fast lookup information. However I don't think I'm going to need to create these since they appear to be repairable so once the files are present it should just be a case of repairing the databases and starting the server. I hope!

If any Apple Mail Server ninjas know more than I do I'd really appreciate some advice from someone who's gone before.

Thanks

[besson3c]

Cyrus uses a combination database index as well as file structure where each file is an email message. The Cyrus database format can be a variety of formats: skiplist, bdb, etc. In addition to the individual account database information (which can be used to reconstruct mailboxes), there is also a listing of which accounts live on which server in a multiple server/clustered IMAP server environment. If you are using a new version of Cyrus, you can work with a unified murder server/IMAP backend environment. I'm assuming that none of this applies to you really if your OS X Server is your only IMAP server, but you may have stumbled across these configurations.

I would be surprised if Apple touched the Cyrus source code at all, as Cyrus runs a lot of big enterprise email systems. They may have provided their own GUI for cyradm (the CLI admin interface), but that's about it. Therefore, you should be able to get all the help you need in the general Cyrus community.