[SGVLUG] covertly converting e-mail...

[Emerson, Tom]

Well, I've got a few more successes with Amavis under my belt -- seems there is a fundamental difference of opinion between the way I've used spamassassin in the past and the way amavis wants me to use it now, but that's another story [see me after the meeting at BC for details...]

so I'm on to the next step of (covertly?) converting the minister of my church to Linux [well, not all that covertly -- he is aware of what I'm doing, but the rest of the office staff may not be]  Basically, there are two or three e-mail accounts that I'm going to be consolidating to this machine, and I've already set those up as regular users on the linux machine and (by extension) use a Maildir tree for storing e-mails -- these will then be made available to the clients via imap, and (in theory) the users should be none the wiser...

As you might guess, there are plenty of e-mails already on the "client" machines which I'd like to migrate to the "server".  Any recommendations on conversion techniques or tools?  (this will be a "one time" conversion, so I don't see much point in buying a "commercial" product, and I'm not entirely sure the "trial" versions will let me get by -- I already found one that warns me it will "randomly replace non-essential headers with 'please buy me' until unlocked")

The client machines are currently using some flavor of outlook, possibly even "express", but at least I know they will support IMAP after-a-fashion -- I might even put the "server" on the Minister's desk itself (he types his sermons at home on a regular typewriter, so all that leaves is e-mail and websurfing -- kde will work "just fine" for him) so that's one client that will actually be local.  Even if outlook doesn't work well enough to appear transparent to the users, I could probably put in the windows version of thunderbird or eudora without too much fuss (might even do it "just because")