Moving to Staffmail.ed from Mail.inf

What follows is a fairly general explanation of the steps involved to move your mail folders from our existing mail.inf.ed.ac.uk service to the University's staffmail.ed.ac.uk service. If you would like to make the move, but find you don't understand the process, or want some help/clarification, please use the support form to ask for some assistance.

If you are no longer an active member of staff at Informatics, but still use your @inf email address, then you need to contact support on the above link, so we can arrange to forward your @inf mail to some other address. As it will be unlikely that you'll have a @staffmail.ed address to forward to.

Essentially the process of moving your mail account from mail.inf to staffmail.ed is simple:

• Place a forwarding rule in your current mail.inf filters to forward all mail to your UUN@staffmail.ed.ac.uk address.
• Update your mail client to access the IMAP server imap.staffmail.ed.ac.uk, rather than mail.inf.ed.ac.uk

Though these minimum of steps will basically work, there is more work involved if you want to preserve your existing mail folder(s), filters and (if you change your outgoing, SMTP, server) your "From" identity.

Note that moving to staffmail does not mean you have to change your email address, you can continue to use and publicise your username@inf.ed.ac.uk address.

We'll assume that you know how to access your staffmail.ed.ac.uk account via the www.staffmail.ed.ac.uk interface, and that you normally use an IMAP aware mail client. Do not proceed any further, if you do not know what your EASE username and password are, or if you cannot access the staffmail.ed URL above. Both of these services are run by Information Services, and contain help links if you have problems.

Also do not proceed further if your EASE username is different from your DICE username. They should be the same, if they are not then this needs to be sorted. Contact support.

Moving your existing mail

Before proceeding, you should be aware that there is a default 2000MB mail quota on staffmail.ed. so if you are currently using more than 2000MB on mail.inf (send mail to quota@inf to find out your usage), you should stop now and arrange to have your quota on staffmail.ed increased (in some cases this has already been done for you). I'd also suggest you read through these notes entirely before attempting the move.

The tool we'll use to move all your existing mail to staffmail.ed is imapsync there is a man page, and imapsync --help gives a brief help to all of its options. There is a --dry option, which will report what it would do, but not actually change anything, which you may want to experiment with.

To move all your existing mail from the mail.inf.ed.ac.uk server to staffmail.ed.ac.uk, issue the command:

imapsync --host1 mail.inf.ed.ac.uk --user1 neilb  --ssl1 --host2 imap.staffmail.ed.ac.uk --user2 neilb -ssl2 --noauthmd5 --syncinternaldates

(replacing neilb with your username, also note this is a very long command, you may need to scroll your web browser to see it all). You will be prompted for your mail.inf and your staffmail.ed passwords.

Depending on the amount of mail you have, this could take a while. I had 32000 messages, across 280 folders, totalling 240MB of mail. It took 100 minutes to imapsync that to staffmail. By that measure, 500MB of mail will take about 3½ hours.

It is safe to interrupt the process and rerun the command to complete an interrupted transfer.

If you have existing folders on staffmail.ed.ac.uk, then these will be preserved. Any with common names will just have your mail.inf messages appended to them. There are options you can give to imapsync to automatically mark for deletion (and optionally expunge) messages on either the source or destination. You may only want to use these (probably the --delete2 option) if you don't go straight to the next part of migration to staff mail, ie the "Forwarding your mail" section.

eg I left it a few days between doing the first imapsync and setting up the forward, so prior to setting up the forward I did:

imapsync --host1 mail.inf.ed.ac.uk --user1 neilb --ssl1 --host2 imap.staffmail.ed.ac.uk --user2 neilb -ssl2 --noauthmd5 --syncinternaldates --delete2 

This will mark any messages on staffmail.ed that I've since deleted (between my first run of the imapsync command and this run) on mail.inf. Otherwise messages I'd deleted on mail.inf may appear to have reappeared. Then after checking the updated folders on staffmail.ed, did the expunge of the deleted messages in my mail client.

Forwarding your mail

First, log in to http://www.staffmail.ed.ac.uk, and check your existing staffmail.ed filters, to make sure you are not currently forwarding UUN@staffmail.ed mail to UUN@inf.ed.ac.uk, otherwise a mail loop will be created. Perhaps send yourself a message to UUN@staffmail.ed.ac.uk and make sure it doesn't arrive in your mail.inf INBOX, but that it does arrive in your INBOX on staffmail.

Assuming you are not forwarding mail from staffmail.ed to mail.inf, then login to the http://mail.inf.ed.ac.uk web interface and insert a filter at the top of your existing filters to "Select on From: containing *" and "Forward to UUN@staffmail.ed.ac.uk", and then enable the rule. From now on, any mail sent to your UUN@inf address will be forwarded to your UUN@staffmail.ed. Make sure you typed your UUN@staffmail.ed address correctly, or someone else may end up getting your mail!

If you make use of plussed addresses, eg neilb+foobar@inf, then you should see the section on plussed addresses in the web page on staffmail differences.

Once you have forwarding setup, and you're happy all is well, it would me more efficient if we (the computing staff) setup an explicit forward in the mail server configuration. So please let us know (via the support form) that you have moved to staffmail, and we can setup this forward.

Configure your mailer

Due to the number of mail clients in use, we can't go into details here, just the principles. Check out the EUCS documentation on configuring the supported mail clients. But simply, where your currently mail client is set to fetch mail via IMAP from mail.inf.ed.ac.uk, you should change this to imap.staffmail.ed.ac.uk. If your mail client has stored your mail.inf password, then you will need to tell it to forget what it stored. One possible problem is that staffmail only supports encrypted authentication, which you should (of course) already be using.

It is *strongly* recommended that you do not store either your Informatics or EASE passwords in your mail client.

That's the minimum you have to do, and for some mailers it will be enough. You don't need to change your outgoing SMTP server, in fact you may prefer to keep using smtp.inf.ed.ac.uk or the older postbox.inf.ed.ac.uk as non-fully qualified addressee's will continue to work as expected. However, it would be advisable to tell your mail client to which domain it should assume if you don't specify a domain.

@ed.ac.uk aliases

If you have an existing Firstname.Surname@ed.ac.uk (Edinburgh Mail Directory) style alias that points at your @inf.ed.ac.uk address, then once you setup the @inf to @staffmail forward, then this will work as before. However, it is slightly more efficient (and removes a dependency on mail.inf) if you update your Firstname.Surname@ed.ac.uk alias to point directly at your @staffmail.ed.ac.uk address. To do this, send an email to maildir@ed, explaining that you'd like the alias updated.

Kerberos Authentication

DICE machines have been configured to do cross realm authentication with EASE, so you will automatically get access to your mail (if your mail client supports Kerberos, Thunderbird and alpine do) without having to enter your EASE password.

For example if you have pine configured to access your mail from imap.staffmail.ed.ac.uk, then it will all "just work", providing you have current Informatics kerberos credentials.

Differences between mail.inf and staffmail.ed

There are several differences, features and gotchas between mail.inf and staffmail.ed, you should read Staffmail differences for a list of them.

One thing you'll have to do, is re-implement any filters you had on mail.inf, in the new filtering system on staffmail.ed. Also check you enable the spam filter on staffmail.ed, and copy any white-lists you had across.

Once you are happy that all your mail has copied, and working as expected. You should contact support and they can remove your old mail.inf folders (or you can delete them yourself). This will save any confusion as where your mail actually is, and at some point we will be to turning off the existing mail.inf IMAP service.