On Sun, 22 Jun 2014, Chris Green wrote:
On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 01:54:59PM +0100, nev young wrote:
On 22/06/14 13:39, Chris Green wrote:
My wife is using Thunderbird on a new[ish] xubuntu 14.04 system. She has now got it fairly well configured and working the way she wants so the next step is to move her old 'local' E-Mail across.
No way is this remotely easy, I can sort of see how it might be done but there are so many gotchas that I fear it's going to be a mess.
Why can't modern E-Mail program simply use mbox (or maildir, I'm not too fussed) as they were designed rather than having to add all sorts of specially named directories and indexes?
Do you have ImportExportTools 2.8.0.4 installed as an addon for Thunderbird?
Not yet but I've read about it, I don't think it really does what we want because it will rename the 'imported' local directory as 'local<something>' apparently, that's just what we don't want. We want to integrate the imported stuff into the existing local directory (mostly as new sub-directories).
-- Chris Green
"Why can't modern E-Mail program simply use mbox (or maildir," But is that what you want? Back in 2002/3 I used to use Outlook and it messed up my emails. That put me off using an email client.
I don't know what folk do with Linux and 6 month release cycles - it seems hardly worth setting up an email client. I found T'bird too slow for imap and used a Text client (Alpine, Mutt also) set up to read the server directly i.e. not storing headers in an mbox or maildir. I presume folk then copy across their mbox/maildir but there is still the risk of a large mbox 'crashing'.
Each release I just install Alpine and copy over the .pinerc, .addressbook file and all ready to go. I save important emails to txt files, and have a filter to delete mail over 18 months. That works well for me. use Mutt and you could set up something a bit more sophisticated.
An option you may not have considered is MH format (Emacs MH, Sylpheed and Claws), emails being saved as separate files in a directory. I found Sylpheed and Claws very fast and Sylpheed seemed a little 'more polished' than Claws. Sylpheed is quicker a sit reads mail in a different way - the apps look similar but 'under the bonnet' quite different.
#james