[Discuss] Migrating hundreds of mbox files to an IMAP server?

Dan Ritter dsr at randomstring.org
Mon Jun 2 09:24:19 EDT 2025


Daniel Barrett wrote: 
> What's the best way to import 600 mbox files to an IMAP server?
> 
> Background: The files were created locally by Thunderbird, arranged in
> a file hierarchy. I'd like the same hierarchy to be created on the
> IMAP server. For example, the mbox file named Recipes.mbox would
> migrate to a new IMAP folder named Recipes, and the mbox file at path
> Foo/Bar/Blat.mbox would migrate to a new IMAP folder "Blat" within
> folder "Foo/Bar" on the IMAP server.
> 
> I don't have direct filesystem access to the IMAP server. (It's
> fastmail.com.)

Two phases:

1. Convert mbox to maildir - mb2md 

2. Use isync (aka mbsync) to upload the maildir hierarchy to
IMAP.

Both of these are packaged in Debian. They both have recursive
modes.

-dsr-


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