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Re: Converting sendmail based (Cyrus) mailsystem to MSExchange (Has anyone done this?)

 
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Tony Rose
Advisor

Converting sendmail based (Cyrus) mailsystem to MSExchange (Has anyone done this?)

Currently I am running sendmail 8.6 on HP-UX 10.20 on a K460. This is an SMTP, IMAP, and POP server running Execmail, which is a Cyrus based mailserver program from MessagingDirect.

We are going to be converting to MSExchange soon, and I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with ways to get the user's IMAP inboxes and folders over to MSExchange?

Any opinions, suggestions, gotchas, or advise is greatly appreciated. No MSExchange slams please.... I know, I know.... :-)

-tr
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Jordan Bean
Honored Contributor

Re: Converting sendmail based (Cyrus) mailsystem to MSExchange (Has anyone done this?)

With a month of preparation, we were able to migrate all of our users' mailboxes from Sendmail to Exchange overnight. Contact me at jordan{at}sliderule.org for details. When I have time, I'll post the entire procedure here.
Jordan Bean
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: Converting sendmail based (Cyrus) mailsystem to MSExchange (Has anyone done this?)

We had talked with a number of sites that had already gone through or were in the process of migrating from UNIX mail to Exchange. The biggest problem they had was migrating users from a POP client/configuration to Outlook with the Exchange option at the same time. We didn't want to deal with that yet. Others had setup Exchange to receive mail first, then forward to the UNIX server for users who had not already been migrated... Or vice versa. We didn't want to take that long.

Our goal was to replace the UNIX servers with an Exchange servers as quickly and seemlessly as possible. We wanted our users to continue using their POP clients (Eudora, Netscape, etc) without reconfiguration for as long as necessary. Only their passwords would change. Later we would migrate the clients to Outlook by department over the next year.

We spent about three months engineering the solution in a isolated test environment. Setting up the Exchange servers was easy. Creating the recipients in mass and migrating the mailboxes was a little more sticky, but not as difficult as we orginally thought. The hardest part for us was getting our user account information accurate.

We spent about a month cleaning up the scripts and procedures to maintain the accounts in the company database and UNIX servers. From that we generated CSV files defining all recipient mailboxes and lists. These files were properly formatted for import into Exchange were everything was automatically created. Also from the database we created simple lists of accounts to retire on the UNIX servers.

Now with the servers in agreement with mailboxes and addresses, it was time to push all the unread mail from the UNIX servers to the Exchange servers. After stopping the flow of incoming mail, we ran an elaborate PERL script on the UNIX servers to locate all the mailboxes for all active accounts, parse them for unread messages without the POP3 X-UIDL header, and transfer them to the Exchange servers using Net::SMTP. To expedite processing, we had the script divide the responsibility between four threads.

It was wonderful watching the internet mail connector receive and deliver the messages with a relatively tiny number bounces due to anti-virus, bogus headers, etc. For the most part it was a very successful migration.

When it was all done, the servers switched placed and all seemed well. We had a few users complain about their password being changed on them, but they were warned!


Joe Hrbek
New Member

Re: Converting sendmail based (Cyrus) mailsystem to MSExchange (Has anyone done this?)

I don't suppose you could email me those scripts you wrote? I will be facing the exact same situation in a few months. Sendmail (cyrus IMAP) -> Exchange.
Tony Rose
Advisor

Re: Converting sendmail based (Cyrus) mailsystem to MSExchange (Has anyone done this?)

We are just now underway with this project and are writing scripts now. Please send me your email address to:

rose@elon.edu

Jordan Bean
Honored Contributor

Re: Converting sendmail based (Cyrus) mailsystem to MSExchange (Has anyone done this?)

Hmm. I found the original perl script I had used (attached) to handle finding and fowarding unread messages. I do not have the perl scripts that were used to generate the CSV import files defining the Exchange mailboxes and distribution lists from data in an Informix database.