Migrating email accounts from a cPanel hosting environment

alexweissman · December 25, 2015, 4:16pm

Hey guys,

After a little bit of futzing around, I think I’ve figured out a good way to transfer email accounts in bulk from a cPanel shared hosting account to a mail-in-a-box server. See this Gist:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/alexweissman/72b58d2cee2ec48efe47

README.md

# Migrating email accounts from a cPanel hosting environment to Mail-in-a-Box

## Part 1: Pregame

1. Send a mass email to all of your account holders, letting them know that you will be migrating their email accounts to a new server.  Send them the instructions from MiaB control panel for connecting to your MiaB server from their mobile/Outlook/Gmail/etc, if applicable.  Also, send them a link to the new webmail address.  Be sure to give adequate advanced notice (several days, if possible).  Advise them to not change their passwords during this time (their passwords will be preserved during migration).
2. Create a new "test" email account in the MiaB control panel for your domain.  This will let MiaB set up the DNS records needed for the domain.

## Part 2: Copy credentials

Copy the email account credentials from your cPanel host to MiaB:

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convert_user_accounts.php

<?php

// The path to your shadow file, which contains the old password database
$path = "example.com/shadow";

// The domain portion of your email accounts
$domain = "example.com";

$fp = fopen($path, "r");
if ($fp) {

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extract_mail.php

<?php

$path = "example.com";

foreach (glob("$path/*", GLOB_ONLYDIR) as $dir) {
    // Move regular subdirectories
    foreach (glob("$dir/*", GLOB_ONLYDIR) as $subdir) {
        $target = __DIR__ . "/extracted/$subdir";
        
        if (!is_dir($target)) {

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Please note that this is a work-in-progress, drawn from my own digging and experimenting. Let me know if you see anything that is incorrect, missing, or needing clarification. I take no responsibility for any lost data!

benmaynard · December 26, 2015, 8:09pm

Not something I need, but good work. Sure it will come in useful for some people!

jamiele23 · January 9, 2016, 12:15am

Looks great!

Just a quick question. In the .php files it has mentions of example.com/shadow. Should i change this or do i leave it as is?

alexweissman · January 9, 2016, 6:46am

You should change that to the path for you actual shadow file in your cpanel account.

jamiele23 · January 9, 2016, 7:13am

I see. I assume I’ll have to change the domain for every domain I bring across?

alexweissman · January 9, 2016, 7:21am

Yup. If you have a lot of domains, I’d start by doing one just to make sure it is working as expected. After that, you could probably just modify the script so it loops through the rest of your domains.

jamiele23 · January 10, 2016, 4:32am

Great. Thanks for the great work and code! One last noob question. How do you run the php code?

bronson · January 11, 2016, 3:58pm

The stock answer is that MiaB is for hosting email. To keep things stable, host PHP somewhere else.

That said, there’s a forum post on here that talks about how to do it.

alexweissman · January 11, 2016, 5:18pm

I think @jamiele23 is just asking how to run PHP from the CLI in general, not on the MiaB server specifically. My script is a one-time script that can be run on any machine - it doesn’t need to be run on the mail server.

As long as you have PHP installed on your machine, you can simply run it by doing

php convert_user_accounts.php

For more examples, see http://www.jarrodoberto.com/articles/2011/12/running-php-from-the-command-line-basics

bronson · January 11, 2016, 5:59pm

Oops, you’re right. Sorry for not scrolling up!

jamiele23 · February 1, 2016, 12:35pm

Great thanks, however where should I be storing this file? In the root directory?

jamiele23 · February 6, 2016, 1:54pm

root@box:~# sqlite /home/user-data/mail/users.sqlite
Unable to open database “/home/user-data/mail/users.sqlite”: file is encrypted or is not a database

Anyone else having this issue?

osiloke · November 28, 2016, 12:34pm

i assume you are using sqlite, use sqlite3 “/home/user-data/mail/users.sqlite”

Jeroen · November 30, 2016, 11:11pm

Good work!

Really like this idea. Personally, I’d prefer a script like imapsync, because it’s more versatile - but for some complete overkill and more difficult to setup due non standard dependencies.