Mailmigration

The following steps are required

1. Checking the contents of the PEM

The PEM can be found in the Registry under 'Modify Person' for each person in the field 'Physical e-mail address'

If the PEM contains mail.ifh.de or imap.ifh.de), then go to step 2. Otherwise no migration is required.

If the PEM does not point to Hamburg (does not contain desy.de), then only the mail routing has to be adapted (then goto step 4)

2. Check that no mails are stored yet in Zimbra

Visit the URL Zimbra and search there for non empty mail folders. If folders with mails do exist, please save its contents or rename the mail folders such that there will be no name clash between folders in Zeuthen and folders in Zimbra. Under some circumstances existing mails in Zimbra can get lost when doing the mail migration. Go to step 3.

3. Mail migration

Please login on a fast machine (work group server or host 'transfer', no desktop!!!). Windows users have to login there using X-Win32 or putty. Execute

   /products/scripts/fast_mailsync

The script does start with a password dialog (twice) for the Zimbra server (DESY password). Then the mail migration takes place. This process must not be interrupted. Depending on the number of mails and the number of folders the migration step can take quite some time (approx. 10 minutes/GB). Error messages can be ignored. The progress of the migration is displayed with 3 counters. The script is based on the program mbsync (/products/admintools/scripts/mbsync). A man page for mbsync is on /afs/ifh.de/user/f/friebel/public/mbsync.1 and on /afs/ifh.de/user/f/friebel/public/mbsync.pdf The mails get copied to Zimbra only, they will not be deleted in Zeuthen. Therefore this step is safe and a loss of mails cannot happen. Do continue with step 4 only after successful completion of this procedure.

4. Delete (or set differently if needed) the mail forwardings in Zimbra

Login to Zimbra, select Preferences, then on the left side click on 'mail'. Look on the page for the section 'Receiving Mail' and delete there the field 'Forward a copy to:'. If a forwarding of all mails is wanted then that field has to be filled properly. Depending on whether a local copy should be retained or not the field 'Don't keep a local copy of messages' has to be set accordingly. Do not forget to save the changes! Go to step 5

5. Changing the PEM in the registry

Login to https://registry.desy.de/registry, choose 'Modify Person' and search for the correct person (i.e.yourself). If more than one result is displayed, select the correct one. Then change the field 'Physical e-mail address' to <accountname>@mail.desy.de, e.g. friebel@mail.desy.de and click on 'save data'. Do allow for 10..20 minutes after having changed the PEM. Then the mail routing in Zeuthen should work properly, i.e. all mails get redirected to Zimbra and no new mails will arrive in Zeuthen. Go to step 6

6. Check for newly arrived mails in Zeuthen during the mail migration

Simply repeat step 3. Important: no mails should have been deleted meanwhile in Zeuthen, as this delete would be propagated to Zimbra. This repeated synchronization should typically last for a few seconds only.

If all mails have correctly been transferred to Zimbra, optionally step 7 can follow

7. Deleting the mails in Zeuthen (optional)

Important: after deleting mails in Zeuthen the migration step (3 and 6) must not be repeated, otherwise the delete will get synched to Zimbra and the mails would also be removed from Zimbra.

8. Reconfiguration of the mail clients

With this last step the migration procedure is complete. As from now on the Hamburg mail infrastructure gets used, all mail clients (on the desktop, laptops, cellphones, ...) have to be reconfigured

For this procedure please follow the instructions on the web. At least the mail reception (mail.desy.de) and sending mail (smtp-auth.desy.de) has to be configured properly.

Sending mails from private computers behind a router may remain blocked unless the mail server smtp-auth.desy.de gets declared on the router as a secure mail server (this is e.g. the case for newer Telekom routers).

For alpine at least the following changes have to be made in the Config menue (m s c):

SMTP Server (smtp-auth.desy.de/submit/user=accountname)
Inbox Path (mail.desy.de/ssl)
Customized Headers (From: firstname.lastname@desy.de)

and in the Collection Lists menue (m s l):

IMAP folders (mail.desy.de/ssl)instead of imap.ifh.de

If there are other occurences of the string imap.ifh.de then they have to be replaced by mail.desy.de/ssl as well. Especially the sent-mail folder (field Default FCC) might have this string.

$/!\$ If then the command

grep ifh ~/.pinerc

is still producing output containing the string mail.ifh.de or imap.ifh.de then the corresponding fields in pine have to be changed.

It is recommended that GUI users (Thunderbird etc.) create a new account with the proper settings.