moving old mail (pine) to new machine

[smp]

I was never able to figure this out and googlins didn't help me much ..

I have postfix running on my server here and I use pine on the same machine to read my mail. For the life of me (and I know this is stupid) I can't figure out where pine stores mail!!!
So, I don't know what dir or what, to move to the new mailserver/computer whatever .. as this one will be formatted.


😱
Thanks.

 

[smp]

well I tarred up /var/spool/mail/$user .. so I guess I can just untar that into the new machine?
Should that work?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

That should work fine. No need to tar it even; it's just a regular file (mbox format). Just make sure that it has the right permissions on the target machine. Depending on how your mail is set up, you might have a file called mbox in your home dir, and you might also have a directory called Mail or mail in your home dir. (And there are probably a bunch of other possibilities I have no idea about.)

 

[smp]

Hmm.. what if the new machine has had mail running on it for a week or so and there is already a mail file on that machine .. if I replace it, I lose my new mail. Any way to merge them?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

AFAIK, just cat your new mailbox onto the end of your old mailbox. mbox files are just plain text files, that literally just contain each email, one right after another.

Make sure you backup these files before trying my advice 😛

 

[smp]

How would I cat them together?

cat oldmail newmail > presentmail ?
sort of like?
I've only ever used cat to read stuff, and then only for the hell of it .. but I normally read stuff with less and tail.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

cat newmail >> presentmail

> writes to a file (i.e. discarding its current contents), >> appends to a file.

 

[smp]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
cat newmail >> presentmail

> writes to a file (i.e. discarding its current contents), >> appends to a file.

Thanks!
That's 2 tonight WongFooey