The mb2md command:

Converting your saved mail so IMAP/Webmail can see it

If you normally use a UNIX shell mailreader (Pine, Mutt, Elm, etc.) to read your mail, chances are that you've saved some emails off to separate folders at one time or another. These folders are probably stored in the classic UNIX "mbox" format. That's fine for Pine, Mutt, and Elm, but our new Webmail system can't recognize mbox-format folders and neither can our new IMAP mailserver package. The new IMAP and Webmail system uses a format called "Maildir++" for mail storage.

So, if you want to see the contents of your saved mail folders in Webmail or your IMAP mailreader, you'll have to convert your old-style mbox folders into Maildir++ format. You can do this from the UNIX shell, using the "mb2md" command. Here's how to use it.

(NOTE: Before you do this, you should know that some UNIX mailreaders can be configured to read Maildir++/IMAP folders, and others can't. Elm in particular is totally without any Maildir or IMAP support. Please keep this in mind before deciding to convert your folders.)

Usage: mb2md (old-mbox-folder) (new-Maildir-folder)

In other words, if you have an old Elm folder (in your Mail directory) called "penpals" and want to convert it to a Maildir++ folder also called "penpals", you'd type:

mb2md ~/Mail/penpals ~/.maildir/.penpals

• Maildir++ folders should always go in your ~/.maildir directory.
• The folder name must begin with a dot.
• If your destination folder already exists, "mb2md" will append the contents of your source folder to any mail that's already there. This means that if you run "mb2md" twice on the same folder, you'll have 2 copies of each email!

Once you've seen that conversion was successful, you can go back into your old mail directory and delete the old "mbox" folder.

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