View Venu Anuganti's profileIMAP to Exchange 2003 migration
Yesterday here at Yahoo my mail server was migrated to new Microsoft Exchange server 2003 from the earlier IMAP server. As usual all my mail clients (Linux Fetchmail/Procmail and Windows Outlook and Thunderbird) failed to connect. It was a big pain to setup the whole thing back and re-creating the old IMAP rules to new Exchange server as there was not any auto migration.
Anyway, after configuring the Outlook with the new Exchange 2003; I re-wrote all my existing IMAP rules to server side and re-created all the folders. Once that is done, I can even access the new mail using Outlook Web Access (OWA). Once this step is done, I re-configured my Thunderbird client by subscribing to all folders in the exchange and things are back to normal. I prefer Thunderbird over outlook because of one of the internal Thunderbird plugin that allows to complete details of the sender if the sender is a yahoo employee.
By default the Fetchmail did not work on my Linux box where I fetch and forward a copy to another IMAP account which is accessible via my iPhone. And noticed that the old IMAP sub-folders which were like “INBOX.BLABLA” is not working with Exchange and instead needed to change it to “INBOX/BLABLA” in order to get rest of the sub-folders. I also needed to get rid of SSL support in order to get fetchmail to work.
1 Comment
Outlook is the kind of application that engenders a lot of talk and misconceptions. My colleagues sometimes say that it’s bloated with unneeded stuff and you need to reconfigure it from scratch each time you want to migrate user settings. Personally I had the same harsh feelings about it when I was managing mail migrations. I remember we had some funky problems when we were migrating our mailing stuff to Microsoft Exchange 2003. Only that we were using less efficient protocols there because we couldn’t use IMAP4 due to a limitation we had in the mail server software we used in those days. That is why I think there are so many rumors about Outlook’s imperfections. It’s just hard to configure it properly. Really, Outlook works like a charm when it’s configured in a proper manner. And that’s a challenging task. The vast majority of tools that I used to use were just a combination of tricky COM scripting (lately PoSH) and commandline tools. I never thought about desktop management. Mainly because we could only dream about what we have now. We decided to purchase some desktop management stuff later on when we enhanced our presentation on the market and our local office became larger and we realized we couldn’t cope with it. It just happened that we selected Scriptlogic’s Desktop Authority http://www.scriptlogic.com/products/desktopauthority/ among others. The tool had a nifty management console that allowed defining all settings required to set all the mail configuration settings for the user from the start to the end. I was amazed at how quickly I could define an Exchange mailbox, configure Outlook profile. It even had a special gimmick to define a standardized corporate signature right from one single place. This is like with the media center when you can control all the media and devices from one single shell!
Comment :: December 14, 2007 @ 8:25 am