Getting rid of Microsoft Exchange

I’ve been running my own mail server for years now, started off with the default mail server in Windows Server 2003, but quikcly moved to Exchange 2010 > 2013 and now I’m still on 2016. However, I really want to go open source. And fast, since my Exchange 2016 server has been compromised, and is sending out spam, I really want to move on to a clean server.

I can obviously upgrade to a newer Exchange version, and migrate everything, or even just setup a new 2016 server, and migrate everything, to get rid of my spam issues. However, I think it’s better to go with a proper open source solution, like mail-in-a-box, I hear and read a lot of good things about it.

However, I can’t really figure out if there is a way to migrate my Exchange 2016 mailboxes to mail-in-a-box. Can somebody tell me if this is possible?

There are various imap sync tools. I know of imapsync, but haven’t used it myself.

How difficult will depend on how many mailboxes, as it seems to be a fairly manual per-mailbox process. If you’ve only a few users, imapsync looks like the normal way to go.

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Several users have reported successfully migrating by copying and pasting through mail clients such as Thunderbird, but that will vary a lot based on how large the accounts are and your upload connection.

There are about 20 mailboxes (5 domains), most of them are 2-5GB in size, 2 of the mailboxes are not mine, so I don’t have access to them.

I will be moving the AD and Exchange VMs to a new physical server, and put the mail-in-a-box VM on that same server, so if I can copy directly from one server to another, speed should not be an issue.

I don’t know anything about Exchange, but the file format for MiaB dovecot configuration is maildir.

ImapCopy will do the job. With some scripting, you can export all your boxes in a reasonable time

In the and of the config file of ImapCopy, you can add multiple mailboxes to start migration.

An approach could be to do initial sync for example on Thursday and a final sync on Friday (and switch over) in a weekend

If you change the TTL of your MX Domains to - for example - 600 seconds, you can easily switch from the old to the new mailserver.

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