[NBLUG/talk] Moving Mail services from one server to another

[Chris Wagner]

Whenever I've changed mail servers, once the new server was configured
and tested, I would change the MX record over, and also set-up the old
mail server to stop accepting mail and begin relaying mail to the new
server.  At the same time, I would begin migrating mailboxes by using
'mb2md' which is an amazing utility to convert mbox-style mail stores to
Maildir-style mail stores.  This wouldn't require the client to check
multiple mailboxes and also would lend towards the zero downtime goal of
most migrations.  There would, of course, be a period of time where not
all mail would be accessible to the client, but I think this is about as
good as it gets for your situation.

- Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: talk-bounces at nblug.org [mailto:talk-bounces at nblug.org] On Behalf
Of Walter Hansen
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 6:55 PM
To: talk at nblug.org
Subject: [NBLUG/talk] Moving Mail services from one server to another

I'm moving mailservices from one to another as part of an upgrade from a
Mandrake 10 to Mandriva 2006 (sonic colo server).

On the old box I was using old style mailboxes in /var/spool/mail/ and a
cute little pop3 utility to serve them.

I'm sure the new server is set up for the distributed mailboxes.

I've only got a handful of users and would like to add spam filtering
"[SPAM]" at sometime if that's not a big deal.

Anyway any suggestions on how to do this. I'm thinking I should put both
mailservers in DNS, and have the users configure their programs to check
both servers, then remove the old server from DNS and once the old
server has no traffic remove it from the users configurations.

I'd rather not see droped mail in between.


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