uploading old mail to imap

[iphigenie]

Hi

I got fed up with the email service which came with my domains and, not wanting to run my own email server, I ended up signing up with fastmail. Anyway, it's a pretty nice service, imap and all, but I have all this old email accumulated in pocomail over the years which I would love to bring forward.

Alas nobody managed to get pocomail to connect to fastmail. Thankfully the mailboxes are in a standard format so can be imported in almost any client i have ever seen... so i need another imap client which lets me move my old mail to imap.

I tried thunderbird last summer, and didn't have much luck - i imported my old email in tb, set up the imap and tried drag-n-drop to move the local messages on to imap. It seems I have to do it one message at a time and the date of the message becomes the date of the upload, not the original date.

I tried opera and I can do multiple messages with it, but the date is skewed too.

At this stage I don't know whether the date thing is a limitation of the software or the imap server at my provider.

Before I download and test 5 different imap clients, I wondered if those of you using newer versions of TB and other email clients could let me know if their tool lets them move multiple emails to the imap mailboxes and does so preserving the original dates?

thanks

[iphigenie]

I guess I'll just have to install each mail client i can find, see if they can import old mail, set them up to connect to my imap, import some messages, and see what happens if i drag an imported message up to an imap folder.

[iphigenie]

Has anyone had any experience with the following:

http://www.weirdkid....products/emailchemy/

Emailchemy reads email from the closed, proprietary file formats of the most popular (and many of yesterday's forgotten) email applications and converts it to standard, portable formats that any application can use.  Emailchemy also includes an embedded IMAP mail server from which any IMAP-compatible email application can download your converted mail.

the latter could work for me since fmail has a "migrate from imap" option which could get all my old pocomail mail transferred. This seems to cost $28 for one person's email, which is not too bad considering the time it might save me, but it got me wondering...

is there maybe a free/open source imap server which has the option to import mbox? without necessitating 5+ hours of installation, configuration etc. After all I suspect that the developer of this program wrote the conversion bits, but might have embedded a freely available imap server which is happy to import mbox files. Since the mail I need to import is in mbox already I don't really need the conversion.

[iphigenie]

I had a good laugh reading this - resembles a lot of my experiences setting up imap servers and trying to get old stuff in them.

http://www.calbear.org/articles/tag/IMAP