Migrating emails from one Inbox (User A) to another (User B)

Mailbox Structure

All mailboxes are stored in the following directory format:

/var/vmail/{domain.name}/{user.name}/Maildir

Within the Maildir all available folders are named beginning with a "."

These are the Default folders:

.Drafts --> Drafts
.Sent   --> Sent
.Spam   --> Spam
.Trash  --> Trash

Furthermore the user-created custom folders also begins with a "." as well.

.Favourites --> Favourites

The default emails in the Inbox folder of the user resides in cur directory. Correspondingly each individual folder has their own cur directory to store their respective emails.

/var/vmail/{domain.name}/{user.name}/Maildir/cur                  --> Inbox
/var/vmail/{domain.name}/{user.name}/Maildir/.Drafts/cur          --> Drafts
/var/vmail/{domain.name}/{user.name}/Maildir/.Favourites/cur      --> Favourites
/var/vmail/{domain.name}/{user.name}/Maildir/.Sent/cur            --> Sent
/var/vmail/{domain.name}/{user.name}/Maildir/.Spam/cur            --> Spam
/var/vmail/{domain.name}/{user.name}/Maildir/.Trash/cur           --> Trash

Migrating Mailboxes

In order to migrate mailboxes from one user (User A) of arditi.pt to another user (User B) of iti.larsys.pt, we need to simply copy the contents of the cur directory of their respective folders and subsequently fix their ownership.

Example

Here is an example of migrating the contents of User A's Inbox into User B's Inbox.

cp -r "/var/vmail/{arditi.pt}/{user.a}/Maildir/cur/*" "/var/vmail/{iti.larsys.pt}/{user.b}/Maildir/cur/"

This can be done for all the sub-folders via copying their respective cur directory.

cp -r "/var/vmail/{arditi.pt}/{user.a}/Maildir/.Drafts/cur/*" "/var/vmail/{iti.larsys.pt}/{user.b}/Maildir/.Drafts/cur/"
cp -r "/var/vmail/{arditi.pt}/{user.a}/Maildir/.Sent/cur/*" "/var/vmail/{iti.larsys.pt}/{user.b}/Maildir/.Sent/cur/"
cp -r "/var/vmail/{arditi.pt}/{user.a}/Maildir/.Spam/cur/*" "/var/vmail/{iti.larsys.pt}/{user.b}/Maildir/.Spam/cur/"
cp -r "/var/vmail/{arditi.pt}/{user.a}/Maildir/.Trash/cur/*" "/var/vmail/{iti.larsys.pt}/{user.b}/Maildir/.Trash/cur/"

Finally we need to fix the ownership of the files (ebox:ebox by default):

chown -r ebox:ebox "/var/vmail/{iti.larsys.pt}/{user.b}/Maildir/"