Script to move many IMAP mail accounts from an old to a new server over IMAP using offlineimap. Also has support for local backups.
The offlineimap tool is great to sync your mailbox, but if you have to move many mailboxes from one server to another (or create local backups of many mailboxes on one server), writing the config files for it gets tedious. This small and simple scripts generates them for you. Using this script only makes sense if you have many mailboxes on the same server. If not, you can simply use offlineimap directly. Like offlineimap, this script uses the IMAP protocol to access mails on servers, so you do not need file system level or ssh access to the mail server. The data you need to setup your email client is enough.
This is a Bash shellscript that uses the offlineimap tool to get the job done. Offlineimap should come with your Linux distribution.
WARNING: Emails, especially those of others, are better kept safe. Be sure you know what you are doing before running this. You may lose data! This tool comes without any warranties, see the license.
Run ./mass-offlineimap -h for help.
Basically edit the config files oldserver and newserver. Then copy the example file account_mapping.example to account_mapping and fill out user mappings. See the examples in the files, it's easy.
Then run ./mass-offlineimap -l to generate the config for a local mass backup, or ./mass-offlineimap -r to generate the config for a sync between two remote servers.
Then run offlineimap -c <configfile> to start the sync/backup for a single account. When you run mass-offlineimap, it suggests commands you can use to backup/sync all accounts at once.
IMPORTANT: Check the log file or the console output for errors generated by offlineimap to see whether something went wrong! Do not blindly assume your backup/sync worked.
If you get any python stack traces, these are from offlineimap. Just search the web for the error message.
If you have a problem with this script, open an issue at GitHub. See https://github.com/dfsp-spirit/mass-offlineimap/issues
GPL v2, see the LICENSE file.
Thiw was written by Tim Schäfer