Question:

I am moving my @Mail server to another machine, and I would like to move the /usr/local/atmail/users directory that contains all the users mail to the new machine.

However, on disk I have used over 90% of available capacity used, and I cannot tar/compress the users directory locally to copy over the network.

What is a solution?

Answer:

By using tar with ssh, you can tunnel a tar/gzip command and pipe this via SSH to the remote host.

This allows you to network copy the maildir directory with complete ease. The file is

cd /usr/local/atmail/

nohup tar czf - users | ssh root@newserver.com tar xzf - -C /usr/local/atmail &

This tar/gzips the user directory of @Mail then via SSH, connects to the new server and extracts the maildir directory.

You can use this command when migrating an @Mail installation to another machine.

Spelling check doesn't work out-of-box if @mail installed on FreeBSD. FreeBSD ispell places dictionaries in /usr/local/share/ispell and dictionary files have extension *.dict (english.dict) and hash files have extension *.hash (i.e english.hash)

When configured through webadmin @mail accepts /usr/local/share/ispell/english.dict as a dictionary name, but during spell check it looks for hash file english.dict.hash and complains that hash file couldn't be found.

Quick fix:

cd /usr/local/share/ispell
ln -s english.dict english

On @mail webadmin:
English language pack: /usr/local/share/ispell/english

Works!

Under Gentoo Base System version 1.12.0_pre13 I received the following error message when connecting to the POP3 server, via an strace to the authmysqld

"Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) "

This error message is returned via the mysql server 4.1.14 when @Mail attempts to query the database for a username.

As a solution the base encoding must be changed on the mySQL table - This is an error due to the mysql server and the default character sets used.

To resolve issue the following via mySQL:

mysql> ALTER TABLE Users CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

mysql> ALTER TABLE UserSession CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

mysql> ALTER TABLE Groups CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

- This will now allow the POP3/IMAP server to authenticate correctly.

If you receive logs like the following in Exim:

"2006-04-26 05:53:21 SMTP command timeout on connection from server.com [serverip] "

This is due to Exim expecting to read an SMTP command from the client, but no command was read within the smtp_receive_timeout time limit. This can be caused by a slow-link or bad connection to a remote mailserver.

As a solution you can increase the limit under:

/usr/local/atmail/mailserver/configure

Define at the top of the file:

smtp_receive_timeout = 10m

The default is 5m, increase to 10m and this may solve the SMTP timeout.