exchange-away


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Welcome to exchange-away. exchange-away is a collection of PERL scripts (OK, one for now) that ease the migration of a user from one IMAP based mail server to another.

OK, fine. It was written with the express purpose of getting as many of my users of an Exchange 5.5 server and onto an Open Source solution as as quick as humanly possible.

Goal for this site

Unfortunately there was only one human doing the work of writing this script and dealing with the hassles of the migration, so alot has been learned, but it has taken a bit of time, as well. What I'm hoping to grow this website into in the coming months, besides just a site for exchange-away, is a decent source of information for others trying to migrate off that POS solution.

Goal for exchange-away

So right now I'm releasing a 0.5 version of exchange-away so that people can make use of this script, maybe provide some feedback on how to improve it, or hey better yet help me develop it into something great.

The push to get me to finally release the code now was Novell releasing the code to Ximian's Connector. Think 'bout it for a second - if the codeis out there for a MAPI client ot interface with Exchange, how long can it take to write either a MAPI server or a MAPI->IMAP bridge, a-la Binari? Not very long. I've glanced at the Ximian code, there's bout 30k lines of C. Not an overnight project, but it's going to happen, and many of us will be very happy that day.

Right now exchange-away.pl is a fairly flexible command line script to migrate a user between two machines - either one folder at a time, or the whole thing. It can delete all their mail off the old server, it can auto-subscribe the user to their folders on the new server, it can deal with different usernames/passwords on the old and new servers, it can throttle itself so that the oh-so-tenious task of copying messages off the poor Exchange server. Yes, my server was in such a pathetic state that the process of downloading alot of messages was creating too much load.

What's next? I'd like the project to play nicely with LDAP, maybe have a web interface, have the ability to create users on the target machine, maybe have the ability to copy over mail aliases and stuff like that. Of course, open for other ideas, as well.

Please send any questions regarding this project to jlkinsel-spamslame@users.sourceforge.net.

-John
(remove the -spamslame above)
Forums - Downloads - Sourceforge page


Last Updated June 17th, 2004