[ale] POP-to-IMAP (dovecot) conversion

[J. D. Pearson]

Hey ALE'rs,

      I am trying to migrate some people from POP to IMAP so that the 
user's old email is accessible from multiple clients. Currently the 
users are running Thunderbird or Netscape on Redhat so their email is 
stored in their home directory (such as /home/user/.thunderbird). I 
would like to somehow copy their old email into IMAP but have been (so 
far) unable to find a recommended way of doing this.

After configuring thunderbird to use an IMAP account it creates a mail 
directory in the users home (ex: /home/user/mail). I have tried copying 
the users old mail from 
/home/user/.thunderbird/niy65vn6.default/Mail/192.168.1.15/Inbox.sbd/

to

/home/user/mail.

I can then go into thunderbird and click "File" and "Subscribe" to make 
the mail viewable in the new imap account in thunderbird. There are 
problems with this though:

1. Cannot create subdirectories in the email client.
2. Some of the imported subdirectories give error messages on trying to 
access them or are displayed with a .sdb extension.

Is this a problem between mbox and maildir formatting?
Is there a correct or funcional way to do this? A cleaner way to 
approach it perhaps? What do you all think or suggest?

Thanks in advance,

J. D.