Migrating my life to Mail and IMAP
I’ve been thinking of moving my mail out of Eudora for a long time now. With every passing year, Eudora gets only slightly better, while its flaws seem to become more noticeable. This weekend I finally made the move. Actually, I haven’t finished yet. Moving 340,000 messages while keeping metadata (replied-to markers and other such things) intact is a large undertaking, and I’m probably only about 30% done.
What finally spurred me to change was the server that a couple of us set up last month. Thanks to that, I can now get my mail via IMAP, which I’ve wanted for a long time. (I can also check it via webmail and SSH. Yes, I can have my cake and eat it too, as long as it’s an email cake.) Mail handles IMAP quite well and also satisfies most of the constraints I mentioned in my post a year ago. Also, Mail keeps getting better and better with every Mac OS X release.
The tricky part about migrating the past eight years of my life from POP in Eudora to IMAP in Mail is getting all of the details right. Moving the messages themselves would be easy — I’d just copy them onto the server and be done with it. But I want my metadata, nicknames, filters, and everything else. Thank goodness for Andreas Amann and his Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. I’m shocked that Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is free. I’d gladly give him $50 for the time it saved me.
That sort of took care of nicknames and filters — they still required some patching — and it managed to move my mail to Mail’s local storage, but it didn’t move the mail to my IMAP server. As I mentioned, I could’ve copied everything to the server, but I don’t know how Mail stores metadata so I don’t have any reason to think that scp’ing the mailbox will preserve that information. Instead, I’ve been dragging and dropping mailboxes one at a time. With a maximum upload speed of about 30 KB/sec. from my home connection — about four or five messages a second — this will take quite a long time to copy 340,000 messages. I think I’ll finish all of it sometime this week. Then I can get started on migrating this weblog.
Daniel J. Wilson Said,
March 29, 2004 @ 1:45 pm
I’m not familiar with Eudora’s feature set, but if you notice anything lacking in Mail, it is worth checking out this page:
http://www.tikouka.net/mailapp/
I’ve found the MailPictures and MailPriority plug-ins stable and useful. MailAppetizer looks pretty cool as well.
Brooks Moses Said,
March 31, 2004 @ 11:26 pm
That does look like a useful program…. What sort of format does Mail use for its files? (I’m pondering, specifically, because I have no Macs on which to use Mail, but if it’s the same as one of the various Unix mail file formats it might still be quite useful for me.)
On the other hand, my reading this seems to be jinxing my Eudora install. It just now got into a state where, when I tried to exit it, it had an “access denied” exception and then the error-file-logging process got into an infinite loop doing the stack trace. Blargh. I do not need my disk being filled up with overrun log files.
Eric Said,
March 31, 2004 @ 11:36 pm
Mail uses standard mbox, which is one of the reasons why I’m willing to use it.
Brooks Moses Said,
April 1, 2004 @ 12:16 am
Mmm; definitely useful. Now all I need is to find a decent substitute email program for Windows that uses mbox and that has a UI that I like, and I’ll be all set.
Unfortunately, I’m not really aware of one….
Advocate Said,
July 2, 2004 @ 1:00 am
[quote]I’m shocked that Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is free. I’d gladly give him $50 for the time it saved me[/quote]
you would? Or you will? Just a thought (with apologies to Andreas, he’s probably way too much a gentleman to mention this himself)
Eric Said,
July 2, 2004 @ 1:27 am
I didn’t realize that I could. Just now I went to his page, found the PayPal link, and sent him $50. Thanks for the reminder.
Advocate Said,
July 2, 2004 @ 2:42 am
Jeez, go ahead and steal my thunder why dontcha!
[gear change="sudden"]
Your post of November 2003, “restFP and saveFP”, (which is how I found your site, Google did indeed pick it up!), helped me get my first working port of an old unix package to Mac OSX. So thanks a lot for that little gem, and keep writing!
[/gear]
[thought process="random"]
Now all I need to do is land a job there with your cohorts (I saw the demo of dashboard last night on the web, now that’s the kind of stuff I wish I was involved in!!!) 8D
s/Employer/Apple/g
[/thought]