Migrating from Eudora on Windows to Linux

CLIFFORD ILKAY clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org
Tue May 18 02:16:23 UTC 2004


Hi,

One of the applications that has kept me tied to Windows is Eudora. I am 
aware of KMail and Evolution, the two must likely suspects to replace 
Eudora but have a few challenges in the migration.

1. I have almost 6GB of mail spread out over about 800 mailboxes. Many of 
those mailboxes are nested, e.g. Linux>>TLUG>>TLUG - in. I would like to 
preserve the directory hierarchy and can handle that part easily enough by 
scripting the directory creation. I want to change how things are laid out 
anyway so this is not wasted effort. The bigger challenge is how to convert 
the .mbx files to some other MUA while still preserving the message 
attributes. I do not want to lose which messages I responded to, read, 
forwarded, redirected, etc. just because I changed my MUA. I presume one 
would have to read Eudora's .toc files to do that. Does anyone know how I 
can preserve the message attributes?

2. I receive a lot of HTML mail, especially from Microsoft's products, and 
in the tests that I have done, both KMail and Evolution did not display the 
messages properly. I just saw the raw HTML which is useless. And, no, 
lecturing people who send such mail to me about how they should not send 
HTML mail or should use standards compliant mail software is not an option. 
A large number of people use that other OS as a desktop OS so I have to 
find ways of dealing with it at my end, not force them to change. Any ideas?

3. I thought that migrating to IMAP might be useful because I dislike being 
tied to one computer for mail. IMAP works well enough for incoming mail but 
what about outgoing mail? I want my Outbox on the IMAP server too but I 
have not seen any obvious way of migrating my existing Eudora Outbox to 
IMAP without losing a lot valuable metadata. If I move messages from my 
Eudora Outbox to the IMAP server, the To: field is changed to my name, 
which is a bit problematic. How can I work around this? Is this why people 
run things like Notes and GroupWise?

I have looked at things like Squirrelmail but find the idea of checking my 
mail from inside a browser to be unappealing. I have also looked at command 
line MUA's like Pine and Mutt and after being used to Eudora, both seemed 
like big steps backwards, especially Pine.

I thought GNUMail might offer some useful options but when I tried to 
emerge gnumail on my shiny new Gentoo installation, it failed to compile. I 
have not investigated any further.

I hate Eudora 6 so I am very motivated to migrate away from Eudora. The 
latest version of Eudora that I like is 5.2 so if I have to, I can run 5.2 
under Wine. It works but somehow, running it under Wine seems like a half 
baked solution to me, though not as bad as running Windows 2000 in a 
virtual machine in VMWare just to run Eudora.

Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M4N 3P6

Tel: 416-410-3326 

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