Hello...

I'm thinking about the best way to use an email server for my domain. For now it's just for personal mail, nothing big, so I thought about google apps as an alternative to setting up my own imap/smtp server - especially on the initial state, where I'll be restarting my server, and maybe changing to other distributions (I'm just starting with linux administration, the server is just for learning for now).

Anyway... I have some concerns about google apps. I've set it with a test domain, and it works pretty well actually. What I don't like is google's approach to folders, or actually not folders. They use their own idea with labels, but I thinks it's not a big problem, 'cause they're somehow converted to imap folders nowadays.

The biggest problem is with migrating mails from my own server to google. I was using mail on my old shared hosting and I can't find a way to move my old emails (except through drag and drop with thundermail, but I'd prefer some more "elegant" and faster solution).

I found migrationbox website, which was very promising, but they have a list of providers they can use, there's no option to put other settings.
I read about a linux software also, for example imapsync or migrationwizard, but all of them are paid solutions. I have only 1, maybe 2 accounts to move and it's way too much for this kind of soft I think.

There's also google's migration software, but... as I know it works only with google apps for business or education versions.

Do you have any other solution to migrate from other servers to google apps, and maybe some day back to other provider or to my own server?

I started down this path when I migrated to google, and then I realized, I didn't really have *that* many folders. It was just easier to copy the mail in my imap client then to figure out any kind of more elegant migration. I have a whopping 5 mail users, so I just did each by hand. Obviously not scalable to a large number, but it sounds like it's just a couple for you as well.

That said, I have since discovered mbsync that I use to backup my gmail account. You could probably use that for copying.

I did like you said (actually I did it before you said)
There wasn't too much of it, so I just dragged and dropped using thunderbird. Maybe not fast, but it went quite well...

But I'll check mbsync too, it may be helpful in the future. Thanks for information

If you're running Debian mbsync is still called isync.

See the package explanation at

http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/isync

<nitpick>mbsync is part of the package isync. isync is now a wrapper around mbsync.

Thanks for the info, I didn't know it's only part of that package .

The Debian isync package explanation says:

My understanding was 'old' isync + improvements is called mbsync now and 'old' name is still use for wrapping and compability issues.

But, as you said, nitpick

exactly

for the OP, if you google "gmail mbsync", you'll find some walkthroughs for setting that up. I followed one and it was pretty easy.