Transferring saved email on pangea to another account
Last revision September 7, 2007
As described in news items,
email service will end on pangea by November 1, 2007, and
email forwarding will end on June 30, 2008.
What do you do with your saved email that is still in your
INBOX
or in saved email folders on pangea?
These messages will no longer be accessible after November 1.
On this page:
Clean up!
The first thing to do is to clean up!
Delete old messages or entire old folders that you no longer
need to keep.
If you use a POP email client,
you especially need to check your program settings.
If you have checked the
Leave Mail on Server
setting, then potentially thousands of old email messages
are still sitting in your
INBOX,
and you may not even know it, because your program has already
downloaded them to your computer and is only
showing the new messages each time you connect!
Follow instructions
to get rid of all those old email messages in your
INBOX.
The next step for people who use a Windows or Macintosh email client, such as
Eudora,
Outlook,
Mac OS Mail,
or
Thunderbird,
is to
download messages and saved email folders to your local computer.
You will find that this is less troublesome than trying to transfer all
those messages and saved folders to a new email account.
You may need to access some saved messages or folders from multiple
computers.
Leave those on pangea and then transfer them to your new account,
as described below.
If you use
webmail
and
pine
exclusively,
your email is never stored on a "local computer",
but always on the server (pangea), so you
must
transfer it all to your new email account or it will be lost.
Here are the bad things that can happen if you just blindly transfer
all email messages and saved folders from pangea to your new email
account without cleaning up first:
-
You can end up with thousands of duplicate messages.
As noted above, many POP users
have thousands of old emails still lying around in their
INBOX
on pangea which they don't ever see because their program only shows
them the new messages each day.
If these are blindly transferred to your new account, they will be
appear to be "new" and will be downloaded again to your local computer!
-
You can exceed your quota on the new account and then you won't
get any new messages at all!
For example, your
@stanford.edu
account has a 500 Megabyte limit on all email storage
(although you can
purchase more storage).
Some people have more than 500 Megabytes of old email messages
in their
INBOX
or saved email folders on pangea.
A blind transfer will fill their
@stanford.edu
quota, causing all new messages to be rejected!
Transferring saved email to your
@stanford.edu
account.
Once you have cleaned up your
INBOX
and saved email folders on pangea, you are ready to transfer
the remaining important messages to your new email account.
If you are switching your main email account from pangea to your
@stanford.edu
account, then the transfer is easy.
We have written a tool to automatically transfer the remaining
contents of your
INBOX
and any saved email folders you have on pangea. This tool uses
IMAP so it can properly combine your saved messages from pangea
with new ones that are arriving at your
@stanford.edu
address.
To use this email transfer tool, login to the
pangea account maintenance web server,
using your pangea account name and
local pangea password.
Then select
Transfer Email
from the left menu of maintenance applications.
Here are the restrictions and side-effects of this email transfer tool:
-
The software package used to make the actual transfer
(imapsync)
is unable to login to pangea to get your mail if you have any
asterisk characters (*) in your pangea account password.
This is a bug that we cannot fix. The workaround is to use the
Change Password
application in the
pangea account maintenance web server
to change your pangea account password so it has
no
asterisk characters.
Then you can use the
Transfer Email
application.
-
You cannot use this transfer tool to move email messages to a
group IMAP account on the @stanford.edu servers.
Contact the
pangea system manager
for assistance to transfer email messages to a group IMAP account on the
@stanford.edu
servers.
-
You must setup email forwarding from your pangea account to your
@stanford.edu
account before using the tool. The transfer tool will check
and refuse to run until you setup that forwarding. You create the
forwarding using the
Email Management
application of the same
pangea account maintenance web server.
-
Before running the transfer tool, make sure you have no email
programs still running that are connecting to your pangea account.
Just looking at saved messages can possibly interrupt the
transfer and cause it to fail.
-
The transfer tool will move all your remaining
INBOX
messages and all folders of saved email you have created on pangea
(using IMAP,
webmail,
or
pine),
except
it will
not
move any folder named
Trash,
INBOX.Trash,
or
SPAM-Quarantine.
It does not allow you to pick and choose which messages or folders
to move. You have to do that cleanup first before running the tool.
-
The transfer tool will
not
move any messages from pangea that have been marked by your
email program as "deleted".
Most email programs let you mark messages as "deleted", but leave
them in the mail folder to be cleaned out later.
The transfer tool first cleans out those messages marked as
deleted, and then transfers the remaining messages.
-
Because it uses the IMAP protocol, this tool preserves the original
dates, read status, and ordering of your messages.
After you transfer your saved messages, when you connect to your
@stanford.edu
account, everything should look the same as it did on your
pangea account.
-
The transfer tool will warn you if the total size of all your
remaining
INBOX
messages and saved email folders will exceed 90% of the standard
quota on your
@stanford.edu
account.
If this is the case, you should either (1) quit, purchase more
quota, and then try again after that added quota is activated; or
(2) quit, cleanup some more, and then try again.
If you
purchase more disk quota,
when you try the transfer tool again, you can ignore the warning and continue.
-
If you have included the dot character in the name of any saved
mail folder on pangea, that folder will be transferred, but the
dot will be replaced by an underscore. For example, a folder named
fieldtrip.2007.05
will be renamed
fieldtrip_2007_05
when it is transferred to your
@stanford.edu
account. This is due to a naming restriction on the central servers.
-
If you have created alternate names for saved
pine
email folders using symbolic links, you will find that
a separate folder is created on your
@stanford.edu
email account for each name.
The folder with the first name in alphabetical order gets all
the messages; the others are empty.
-
Once the transfer tool has started running, you can logoff the
account maintenance web server.
Most transfers complete in just a few minutes to an hour.
If you have many thousands of saved email messages,
it can take many hours to finish.
The transfer tool will send an email message to your
@stanford.edu
account when it is done, or if it fails for any reason.
It is safe to use the
Stanford webmail program
to check your
@stanford.edu
account for this message while the transfer is in progress.
If the transfer fails for a simple reason (such as wrong password), just try
again. Otherwise, contact the
pangea system manager
for assistance.
-
The transfer tool will make up to three attempts to move your email,
in case it is interrupted or fails. Each attempt is limited to a
total elapsed time of two hours, as a precaution against situations
where the tool may get stuck in an infinite loop. The email notification
message will tell you if the transfer timed out so you can retry it.
-
The transfer tool will delete the saved email messages and folders
from pangea after it successfully transfers them to your
@stanford.edu
account. If it fails part way through, the remaining messages will
stay on pangea and you can try again later.
Transferring saved email to a non-Stanford email account.
Options for transferring email to an outside email account (such as
yahoo or gmail) are not as good as transferring to your
@stanford.edu
account.
If your outside email account supports the IMAP protocol, you may be
able to run a modified version of the command used to transfer email
to your
@stanford.edu
account.
You will have to run the
imapsync
program from a
command-line login to pangea using ssh.
Contact
Kai Lanz
for assistance setting up the right arguments and options for the
imapsync
program.
For other outside email accounts that do not support IMAP,
your only real alternative is to re-send all your email messages.
There is a program on pangea that will automatically re-send all
the remaining messages in your
INBOX
plus all your saved email folders to an outside email address of your
choice. To run it, use an
ssh client program
to login to a
command-line session on pangea.
At the
pangea>
prompt, type the command
resendsavedemail
and press the RETURN key.
The program will prompt you for your new email address, which you
type in and then press the RETURN key.
Here are the restrictions and side-effects of this
resendsavedemail
program:
-
You cannot use this program to re-send messages to another pangea
email account.
We are trying to phaseout email on pangea, not add to it!
You also cannot use this program to re-send messages to an
@stanford.edu
account; the
Transfer Email application (see above)
of the
pangea account maintenance web server
will correctly and efficiently transfer saved pangea email to an
@stanford.edu
account.
-
This program will re-send all your remaining
INBOX
messages and all folders of saved email you have created on pangea
(using IMAP,
webmail,
or
pine),
except
it will
not
re-send messages from the folders
Trash,
INBOX.Trash,
or
SPAM-Quarantine.
It does not allow you to pick and choose which messages or folders
to re-send. You have to do that cleanup first before running the program.
-
The original ordering and folder structure of your email messages
will be lost!
Although the original receive date of each message will be preserved
in a header line in the message, your new email account will treat
them all as
new messages
with new received dates.
Each message is re-sent separately, and they may not be received in
the order in which they are sent.
-
The
resendsavedemail
program will try to maintain some order in your messages.
It will first send the contents of your saved email folders, in
alphabetical order, and then the remaining messages in your
INBOX.
Before it opens a new saved folder, or switches to the
INBOX,
it will send a "header" message to your new address with the name
of the new folder. Hopefully, the messages from that folder will
all arrive after that header and before the header from the next folder,
so they will at least be grouped together.
It will insert a 3 second delay between each message that is re-sent
to help them stay in order. This means that it will take hours to
re-send thousands of messages.
-
The program will show the total disk space used by all your saved messages
so you can decide if transferring them all could push you over your
quota limit on the outside email account.
After this usage information is displayed, if you want to continue with
the process and re-send all these messages, you must respond "yes"
to a prompt.
If you think your total is too high for your outside account, respond
"no" to quit the program.
Then cleanup your
INBOX
and saved email folders and try again.
-
Once this program has started the re-sending of your old messages,
you will get another
pangea>
prompt and can type
logoff
and press the RETURN key to end your command-line session.
When the re-sending is finished, or if the program fails, it will send
an email message to your new account.
-
Unlike the transfer tool for
@stanford.edu
accounts
(see above),
the
resendsavedemail
program does not delete messages as they are re-sent.
If some messages are sent and others fail, you will have to manually
clean out the ones that succeeded from your
INBOX
and saved email folders before trying again to re-send the ones that failed.
