Geek & Mild by Sean Sperte

Sep 22nd, 2007 Spam Free Email Redux

Ryan Masuga emailed me with a great question about my spam-free email setup:

if I wanted to change my private email address a couple months down the line […] what would happen to any mailboxes I made for the private1234@ address?

I didn’t have a good answer for him since I don’t store my email in boxes or the inbox; instead, I use Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero methodology, plus a folder in my home directory where I save all archived emails.

Ryan did some research and found his answer:

I found that reducing the number of folders I have made things pretty easy, but isn’t really necessary either. All you need to do is ftp into your site to be able to see the ‘home/{youracct}/mail/{yourdomain}/’ directory (I think…) and within that directory are your mail accounts. Copy mailboxes (I’m on Apache) from old private email directory to the new private email directory and voila - you’ve just moved all the mailboxes. You could probably scp these as well, but I’m not that technically savvy and just copying via Transmit seemed to work OK.

Easy enough — if you have access to your server mail directories.