Transferring lots of messages between IMAP accounts

Question

I have to move many, many emails (over a thousand) from an old IMAP hosting provider to a new IMAP hosting provider. I know I can just set up the old and new accounts in Thunderbird and drag and drop, but it's very slow and keeps timing out. Is there a better, more automated way to copy all messages (and all mailboxes) between IMAP servers?

Answer 1

There are couple of options you could try:

• Check out Google Apps IMAP migration guide, you can setup an Google Apps IMAP account as a temporary placeholder account while you do the transfer.
• Use a third party service like YippieMove. Note that this costs $15 per account
• Do it yourself! A blog post on how you can transfer mails using PHP

Answer 2

IMAPSync is the tool your looking for. IMAPSync

In the FAQ there are plenty of good examples