What is the best way to migrate a Mail server?

Question

I have a Plesk panel mail server with used hard disk space of 480GB out of a total of 900GB. I would like to migrate the plesk panel and data to a new server on raid 1 hard drives(600GB). The mail server has OS Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and the new server that I set up is also on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Are there any commands that can help me achieve this?

The server runs Postfix MTA

Solution

Without more specific info about which email server you are using it's gonna be rather difficult to answer.

One thing you can be interested in is imapsync.

http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-migrate-mailboxes-between-imap-servers-with-imapsync

However, it doesn't support migration of a whole server but rather a separate mailbox.

When it comes to migration of a whole email server it all depends on the format you are keeping your mailboxes. Dovecot's wiki offer a detailed guide about migration of email. http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration. The simplest way is probably a rsync between two folders / network shares. But as far as I know it would work well with Maildir, I am not sure about mbox.

Comments

[Paddington]

I added that I am running postfix.

[Maciej Szlosarczyk]

howtoforge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44857 Please check this out, this should help then :)