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Hey guys. Here at my place of employment, we're currently transitioning the company email accounts from locally-stored POP3 to server-stored IMAP. Due to mailbox size limitations, none of the previous email was kept on the mail server. There are roughly twelve (12) accounts with 5+ years of email which needs to be uploaded, so we're looking at a minimum of a couple gigs apiece.

The email provider is GoDaddy, and the mail clients are a mixture of Outlook 2010, Outlook 2003, and Thunderbird. Right now I'm just focusing on one of the smaller accounts, which is about 2GB and using Outlook 2010. Outlook has the ability to "Sync" the email onto the server, but I then get the following error:

Your IMAP server wants to alert you to the following: Email is too large, limit size to less than 20MB.

Obviously this isn't feasible. I would need to break some of the mail folders into literally thousands of pieces. Is there some sort of automated software which can do the transfer, and preserve all the dates, etc? I'm sure this issue must have been encountered before. Should I be looking at a different email host?

Are you sure it's the folders being too large? 20MB sounds more like a size limit for attachments to me.

Here be dragons.

Yeah, Outlook 2010 doesn't have a 20MB size limit on folders.

GoDaddy has a 30MB size limit per email. Outgoing emails can be no larger than 30MB and attachments can be no larger than 20MB.

source: http://support.godaddy.com/help/article ... imitations

Of course this depends on your ISP too. Some ISPs don't allow emails over certain sizes regardless of your mail provider. Since you're at work let's assume the ISP isn't an issue though.

It's giving that message for transferring folders as well. I don't know if Outlook is sending the folder as a single large chunk, or what the deal is. We just changed ISPs, and there's no difference. I'd be fine with using a 3rd party solution if there were no loss of information.

Have you tried setting this particular account up with Thunderbird?

DancinJack wrote:

Have you tried setting this particular account up with Thunderbird?

I suppose that's worth a shot. Maybe Thunderbird uses a different method for uploading. What a mess.

Now that you mention it, yes it does. We transitioned several users from POP3 to IMAP last year. T-bird will copy individual emails over, but you can do a whole folder at once and to the server it looks like individual mails are being moved.

What we did was change the old POP account to not talk to any server, then set up the IMAP account, then dragged the folders over one by one, then deleted the POP account once that was done. We didn't worry about address books because we had switched to LDAP.