Move a mailbox out of Earthlink Total Access?

July 9, 2007 7:04 AM

(Geekfilter) Can I convert Earthlink TotalAccess (WinXP PC) Email (.dat or .csv) mailboxes to Apple Mail (.mbox) mailboxes on a Mac? (AKA: How can Earthlink be this stupid?)

OK, so here's the situation, and I'm sorry it's a bit detailed, but the one person who knows the answer to this will need all the facts:

1) Person I am helping has an old Windows PC running XP. She uses Earthlink, and had their "TotalAccess" suite installed (nightmarish).

2) She's moving to a new iMac (10.4). She will continue to use Earthlink (also her DSL provider). So we installed the Mac version of TA on her iMac, and it uses Apple's Mail.app as its default email application. Thank Jobs. (And this question would still apply even if we didn't use Mac TotalAccess, but just wanted to use Mail.app as a standalone app.)

3) Oh shit. The PC version of TA uses a proprietary email client that is capable of exporting its mailboxes in two formats: .csv or .dat (which Google tells me is a "proprietary" earthlink email mailbox format, and may or not be the same thing as the contacts .dat format in Outlook/OExpress -- and I was able to move her addressbook into the Apple Address Book without a problem). The onscreen help says to use the .dat export if you plan to reimport into another version of TA, and .csv to import into other mail applications.

4) Apple Mail.app cannot import .csv mailbox files into its native .mbox format, as far as I can tell. Nor can I find an OS X (or PC) email application that does. Nor can I find a standalone format conversion utility that does, for which I would be willing to pay a modest fee.

5) I want to be able, possibly via an intermediary mail application, possibly via a standalone conversion app, to convert either the .dat or the .csv mailboxes (all in one file in either case) into a standard .mbox file. I am stymied.

Or is there another workaround short of resending (to herself) all the email from the original TA mailboxes on the old PC?

Also, I know the CSV file is not corrupted. I can open it and see everything in Excel.

posted by spitbull to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Emailchemy (which I have used, and can recommend) will convert .csv to Apple Mail, among many other formats.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:11 AM on July 9, 2007

Oh, and you can download a demo to try before you buy ($28).
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:12 AM on July 9, 2007

Thanks Blazecock. I'll try it out today. $28 is worth every penny if it works.
posted by spitbull at 9:50 AM on July 9, 2007

Sorry, Blazecock, but Emailchemy only converts *to* CSV, not from it. Any other ideas?
posted by spitbull at 1:59 PM on July 15, 2007

I haven't tried it but ABC Amber EarthLink Converter may be what you need.
posted by euphotic at 3:35 PM on August 11, 2007