Push POP to IMAP Folder
This is for anybody with multiple email accounts that wants to consolidate. My solution here requires and number of POP email accounts and one IMAP account.
I don't even want to begin thinking about the time it took me to come up with this solution. Hopefully it can save somebody 10 or more hours of digging and scripting.
My method works like this.
- Synchronize IMAP account with local Maildir copy
- Download POP emails
- Push emails to Maildir local copy
- Synchronize local Maildir copy with IMAP account
The first synchronization is to prevent any little issues that could pop up.
First and foremost, I assume you are working on a Linux system. No exceptions. I also assume a system that uses Apt.
You'll need to install a couple tools that are most likely not installed by default.
sudo aptitude install getmail4 procmail offlineimap
I did my best to keep everything in a nice central directory which you need to create as well.
mkdir ~/.synmail
The first thing we need to do is create a file in here called pushmail. Rather than showing you all the text, you can just download this script. It's attached as pushmail at the bottom of this post. Download it to ~/.synmail/pushmail You will need to make sure it's executable as well. Just a note, make sure there is no period on the end.
chmod +x ~/.synmail/pushmail
The first file our pushmail script will use is for offlineimap. In order for this application to work, we need to create our very own IMAP directory.
mkdir ~/.synmail/imap
Now we need to create the offlineimap configuration file.
vim ~/.synmail/offlineimap.conf
Rather than go through all the details of setting this up, I just uploaded my copy. It is listed as offlineimap.conf. There isn't puch point in discussing all the various options because there is an excellent fully commented explation of everything sitting on your computer. Just follow these commands to get the copy.
cp /usr/share/doc/offlineimap/examples/offlineimap.conf.gz ~/ gunzip ~/offlineimap.conf.gz
The next file our pushmail script needs is the getmail file. Our script expects this file in a very specific way. It's basically just prefix-getm. I have two gmail accounts so I use gm1-getm and gm2-getm. I uploaded a copy of my gm1-getm file. The values should make sense. If they don't you shouldn't be reading this. This file goes to ~/.synmail/gm1-getm
The only line that might be confusing is the arguments line. The reason we have the " " added in is because of the way parameters are passed to procmail. This caused me a lot of headaches and you're probably better off leaving it alone. The next part is the path to your procmail configuration.
Now that we're on that page, it's time to talk about our procmail configuration. This file will have the same prefix as the one before it. I obviously called mine gm1-proc. Go figure, I uploaded my copy. Not only that, but I didn't have to hide passwords or anything. That's because this file is ONLY a delivery agent.
When you look at this file, notice that there is a line called DEFAULT. This line is the reason we need different configurations for each account. That "FODLER" part at the end is what folder our files will be going into. Unfortunately, we can't leave it at that. Because of the way Maildir works, we need to add the /new at the end. I'm not saying Maildir sucks, and it really doesn't make this any harder.
I probably don't need to note that you need to save this file just like the getmail configuration. Mine is at ~/.synmail/gm1-proc.
Hurray, we now should have everything in place that we need to in order to run this setup successfully. You've probably noticed that our passwords show up a couple times. I don't like it either. We can have a password input file and a few other methods to keep things secure, but none of it is really worth it. Instead, I just like to make it readable and writable to only my user. Not only do I suggest it, it's in the script you got from me.
Keep It Private:
chmod +x 0700 $HOME/.synmail
Now that we have that cleared up, it's time to test this puppy out. I have been using the prefix gm1, replace gm1 with whatever you have been using.
cd $HOME/.synmail/ ./pushmail gm1
The rest will be done for you. What happens is that the script takes your prefix input and uses this to find the other configuration files you created. This is why you need to keep the prefix the same, and follow my naming convention. If you don't like it, then the script is yours, do with it whatever you want. I love open source.
When you're running this script, you will notice that it probably takes an insanely long time to go through. You might say to yourself that there's no way this is acceptable if it's going to happen every time. However, after the first run you'll realize that in fact it was just pulling down every single email you had on your IMAP server. If you look at it closely enough, you'll find that there's more files around than what you expected would be there.
So, you'll see offlineimap making a copy of the current state of your IMAP data. Then you'll see getmail retrieving your POP emails. procmail will be running behind the scenes to sort your mail. And then you'll see offlineimap doing it's last sync with your newer emails going out to your server.
BONUS: You can also use this local copy of your IMAP data if your IMAP server is ever offline or you won't have internet access. I would suggest being careful with it because of the nature of these scripts.
That's the primary intention of offlineimap in the first place.
BONUS 2: I've modified the pushmail script to be able to do ALL files in the directory in one shot. PLEASE DO NOT run this before you've verified ALL of your other settings work. Don't leave any extra -getm or -proc files. If you looks at the script, it'll be obvious why.
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