Imprting Thuderbird into OSX Mail.

March 15, 2005 4:48 PM

I am trying to import Mail Folders from Thunderbird into Mac Mail.

The only problem I've got is a huge section of emails in 2004 will not import. Looking at the files, it appears that earlier and later emails us the $OA character to line break, but the emails in 2004 use $ODOA (Hex). Is there an easy way (using a Mac) to remove the extra $OD character from the offending files.

On a related note. Is there any way in Mac Mail to detect duplicated emails and delete them?

posted by seanyboy to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I used to do that conversion in BBEdit when converting Eudora mbox files to unix line endings for SpamAssassin analysis.

Now I use LineBreak, since BBEdit doesn't open 32mb files as quickly as I'd like it to.
posted by bcwinters at 5:26 PM on March 15, 2005

First off: is your mail server pop or imap? If it's imap, you can just plug those settings into Mail.app and it will pull down all of your mail and folders with the same structure as in Tbird.

You could also do this with vi or sed from the terminal (if you try this, PLEASE do it on a copy of the mailbox file!!)

in vi:

%s/\$ODOA/\$OD/g

using sed:

sed "s/\$ODOA/\$OD/" > newmailboxfile
posted by zerokey at 5:42 PM on March 15, 2005

I concur with zerokey's answer:

First off: is your mail server pop or imap? If it's imap, you can just plug those settings into Mail.app and it will pull down all of your mail and folders with the same structure as in Tbird.

I've done this before, several times and it works fine. This would be the preferred solution.
posted by gaby at 2:33 AM on March 16, 2005

It was POP3. As I've got about 3 Gig of emails, transferring the emails back to my mail provider (imap folders - only 2 Gig space) may be pretty difficult.

As always, thanks for the help.
posted by seanyboy at 9:10 AM on March 16, 2005