As far as webmail goes, I’m a Neomail user, have been for a long while. I don’t know what it is about it – it’s clean interface and quick loading speed maybe? But the time has come for change as cPanel are deprecating the mbox format, why I hear you ask?

Reasons for Deprecating mbox
The new system has several benefits,
– It’s the way forward
– Better performance
– Improved mailbox locking;
– Simultaneous IMAP account access
– Use of open source code.

Is it Necessary?
It is expected that cPanel will continue to support mbox, but will switch to maildir as the default soon. As such I feel I’m probably going to have to take the plunge.

We changed it on one server just recently, a necessary upgrade as part of a fix for another issue – I had no choice and had to do it with no warning to users of that server, I held my breath – no onslaught came. One user asked why neomail no longer worked, when I explained they simply agreed it sounded a better solution and would start to use Horde!

I’m including the remainder of this post, as a reminder to myself of a few things and notes I’ve found around the web. I had one server upgraded last week and the only issue with it was the one user who had mail set to remain on the server for 7 days – all of their old email had to be downloaded again.

Any Known Problems?
There’s always going to be problems in an upgrade of this magnitude in my opinion, the biggest reason for this probably being the millions of different configurations of cPanel servers out there. Generally a fix all for almost everyone seems to be to run the following scripts.

    /scripts/courierup –force
/scripts/eximup –force
(This has solved problems on all but one machine)

One of the notes I also picked up on in the cPanel forums was Outlook Error 0x8004DF0B, this is caused by the default courier imap config:

    /usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/imapd

This is because the maximum number of connections from a single IP that courier allows by default is 4. Take a look at the file above and change the line:
MAXPERIP=4
to:
MAXPERIP=20

During the conversion all mail (POP) will be blocked until the process ends.

HOWTO Perform the Conversion
I’ve read about one server admin team doing the following:

1.) /scripts/convert2maildir
A.) #1 Backup all mail folders on this server
B.) #3 Start maildir conversion process
2.) /scripts/courierup –force
3.) /scripts/eximup –force
4.) /scripts/upcp –force
5.) /scripts/convert2maildir
A.) #3 to convert partially converted mail accounts

Common Complaints

• Missing Neomail Address Books
  In most cases these can be found in:
      /home/<user>/.neomail/user/addressbook

  /scripts/neomail2hordeaddrbook
  Call it with a user as its argument and it does only that user’s addresses, call it with no argument it doeal all users serverwide

  The mail should also be in Horde or SquirrelMail (the user may need to subscribe to the folders again).

• Root Boxes
  Users used to be able to login at http://mydomain.com/webmail with user mydom and password xyzzy. They’d then see the mailboxes for mydom@mydomain.com, as well as a subfolder for the mailbox and folders for their other email addresses such as joe@mydomain.com and sales@mydomain.com.

  This will no longer work straightaway – it was NOT a feature, it was a secuity hole and it’s gone now. Although it appears that Horde have officially added it as a feature in later builds of cPanel 11 (Simply log into Horde as the main account and in the drop-down box in the upper-right corner of the screen you’ll see many things, including email addresses of email accounts on the server you can check by simply selecting them from the drop-down).