On Sun, 7 Mar 2010 20:18:05 +0000 Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk wrote:
On 07 Mar 18:17, Chris G wrote:
On Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 04:09:34PM +0000, Chris Walker wrote:
Ive just bought myself a new machine and am wanting to move the mailboxes from this one to the new one. This one runs Mandriva 2010.1 and the new one runs the 64 bit version of it.
I use both Sylpheed and Thunderbird on here so need to know how best to do it. Both machines dual boot and I've sort of managed it for Sylpheed under Windows XP and completely for Thunderbird on XP. Half the messages are missing on Sylpheed though and none of the accounts have transferred.
I chose Sylpheed for XP as it started life on *nix and to date it's been much more reliable than Pegasus which is what I used before. But I want to avoid the same problem under Linux that I've just encountered under XP -> 7.
Use a sensible MUA that has standard mailboxes! :-)
ENEVERTHERIGHTANSWER. Use an MUA that supports IMAP, leave all mail on mailserver, and stop worrying about which client you're using.
I'd second the recommendation to use IMAP. I have my NAS set up as the IMAP server and this means I can access the same e-mail on my Linux desktop, Linux laptop and Mobile phone. I can also change e-mail client without having to copy or convert all the mail.
FWIW I think Sylpheed's native format is MH which has been around a while and is supported by other software too. It is probably not as popular these days as Maildir.
FWIW for me that means mutt which manages with absolutely bog standard mbox or maildir mailboxes and you just *tell it* where they are. If I was doing what you are trying to do it would just be a case of transferring my ~/Mail hierarchy from old computer to new computer.
I too use mutt, however it doesn't directly access the Maildirs, this means that I can use the same (well, ish) mutt config on the mailserver and my laptop - the only difference being in the tunnel command for imap (I use an ssh connection to connection to the imap store, rather than directly opening the IMAP port from mutt, this means that once my ssh key has been added in to ssh-agent, I don't have to reauth, and mutt knows nothing about my password).
Having said that, surely with thunderbird it's just a case of copying everything under ~/..mozilla-thunderbird to the new system. If you're copying from XP then you need to work out what the equivalent directory in XP is, something under Documents and Settigns I would guess.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHA. Never ever had that work neatly with any mozilla product, they all tend to go up tits when they feel like it.
When things like that don't work it usually means the application has stored some piece of information, critical to either referring to or making sense of the information you've copied, somewhere outside the directory tree you copied. On Windows the usual culprit would be somewhere in the registry. For GNOME there's the GConf equivalent and for desktop environments in general the stuff under .config
HTH, Steve.