Moving Mail via IMAP from Account to Another

Most of the hosting providers these days provide for IMAP access to your mailbox.

This is great, but what if you want to move messages from one IMAP account to another?

We wrote this little tool for it: imap-move.

The IMAP Move tool was written with a few, very specific, intended purposes but there could be others.

1. Archive messages from IMAP into a local directory
2. Move message from one Mailbox to another Mail Account

The tool keeps track of the moved message (by mail message ID) so it can be run over and over on the same source mailbox w/o having to repeat it’s work – this can save time when you have 40k+ messages.

List the Source Folders/Labels

imap-move.php -s imap-ssl://user@domain:password@imap.gmail.com:993/ --list

Source: user@domain
01 Follow up; 0 messages 0 bytes
02 INBOX; 1080 messages 108104263 bytes
03 Misc; 0 messages 0 bytes
04 Priority; 0 messages 0 bytes
05 [Gmail]; skip [container only]
06 [Gmail]/All Mail; skip [skip list]
07 [Gmail]/Drafts; skip [skip list]
08 [Gmail]/Sent Mail; skip [skip list]
09 [Gmail]/Spam; skip [skip list]
10 [Gmail]/Starred; skip [skip list]
11 [Gmail]/Trash; skip [skip list]
11 Folders, 1080 messages, 108104263 bytes

Copy to Local Directory

Please note, this is not a MAILDIR (or, at least I don’t think it is)

imap-move.php 
  -s imap-ssl://user@domain:password@imap.gmail.com:993/ 
  --copy /path/to/storage

Copy one IMAP Account to Another

This can take a long time, the application has a lot of spew, maybe use |tee or something.

imap-move.php 
  -s imap-ssl://user@domain:password@imap.gmail.com:993/ 
  -t imap-ssl://noob@domain:password@imap.gmail.com:993/ 
  --move 
  --copy