Like thousands of people online… when google decided that my domain’s email is no longer hosted for free, I spent a good year or two paying for the email accounts I have, and if like me, you only need gmail for the sake of email, paying this much for email, a technology from 1971 is a crazy !
If you are the domain admin on google workspaces, you probably know that google will allow you to “Take Out” all the data from all accounts on that domain, I will assume you already did that and you have the file (All mail Including Spam and Trash.mbox).
In a different post, I showed you how to do this with dovecot’s own tools to simply copy the files, but that assumes you run your own server ! this post is for the average user, this is the for dummies of moving email from google gmail (Takout for example) to ANY email account on any platform using a nail clipper and some old socks, just kidding, you only need the socks
So, I decided to move all accounts to a server with cpanel, which is a solid solution.
So i started with my email account, it was very straight forward with mutt (apt install mutt), configure my account, then mount the mbox file and push it all to the server
mutt -f ~/takeout.mbox (T to select all messages)
But you are probably on Windows, so for your sake, I did the second account with software that works on windows, so start by downloading and installing thunderbird, once installed, setup your account, with cpanel and most other providers, all you need to know is your name, email address, and password, thunderbird should be able to find the config for your server automatically 😉 (If you are wondering, Your server publishes it’s own config and thunderbird finds it through the email’s domain)
So, now you can see all the new emails that arrived to the new server, once that happens, close thunderbird, then navigate to your thunderbird profile folder, in my case it is at
~/.thunderbird/RANDOMLETTERS.default-default/Mail/Local Folders
But since you are on windows, it would probably be somewhere inside “roaming/thunderbird/profiles”, shouldn’t be hard to find, once inside your profile, go to /Mail/Local Folders and paste the mbox file you have, start thunderbird and it should display the MBOX file on the left panel under “Local Folders”
Once that happens, you can select the messages you want to move (If you are moving thousands of messages, i would recommend you move them in batches, not all at once), right click, then go to the moveto menu that appears, and select the account/mailbox you want them moved to, and watch them move…
Done ?
Now, you can use FTP to see your mail which should be in the devicot folders, (They are not called devicot folders, it is called maildir, but because you are running devicot, I don’t like to add jargon too quickly)
new, cur, and tmp
other files reference devicot, so we know what we have
Notes
If you need to create a new thundirbird profile, under linux you need to start thunderbird with the following command
thunderbird -ProfileManager
Under windows, the profiles page is on the Help -> Troubleshooting information menu !