On Wednesday 19 June 2002 04:37 pm, Patrick Nelson wrote:
We have been using Evolution w/out the connector and like it. Now we want to move everyone off LookOut and Exchange. So, I'll start out with a list of to-dos (note just starting the list here):
On the SendMail server we should... 1. Add users to match users on the exchange server 2. Setup alias and what not... 3. Setup forwards and what not... 4. Change the MX of the domain... 5. Few days later dump exchange... 6. Be happy for eternity?
Any comments? POP and/or /var/spool/mail/<user name here> mbox setup? Any suggestion?
I converted myself from Exchange, although everyone else stayed there. My problem was that I had a ton of mail in the Exchange server. It took me a good 2 or 3 hours to download all the mail to my new server by copying the mail over IMAP between the two systems (with my computer acting as the intermediary). If I had owned the IMAP server, as I did the Exchange server at the time, I would have setup fetchmail and had the server do all the work for me. The list you give above is pretty close. If I were you I would simply tell people the day they are moving, duplicate all the accounts, and cut over the mail. Leave the Exchange server active for a while, but give instructions on how to get their mail off the Exchange server and over to the new server (if you are using IMAP) otherwise how to get it locally stored and set a date to decommission the server (leave enough time for everyone to be converted). The MX records are probably the most important part of the process, and if you must continue to deliver mail to the old server until someone is converted properly, you can set up a redirect for those accounts that haven't been converted (build a quick script to add a .forward file to every account and then when you convert someone simply delete this file). You could setup split delivery for a while, but that just gets messy, because when people start using the new server, they have copies of old mail. There really isn't a clean method to migrate people. When I originally migrated people from Eudora using POP3 to Exchange, people were told to get used to the fact that their old mail was gone. They could keep Eudora around to view the archives but they wouldn't be moved to the new server. I eventually recanted on this for several people, and helped them get their mail converted to a format that Exchange Client could move out to the server. It wasn't pretty and all the mail ended up with the same date, but they didn't mind, they knew it was archival only. Again the only choice you really have to convert the legacy mail is probably IMAP. There are some converters for Outlook Express mail, but given the option of using IMAP instead, I would pick it first.