PC>Mac email transition and reorganizing years of emails.

November 3, 2007 2:58 AM

Compounded question with PC->Mac transition involving multiple Eudora copies and which mail program under Leopard should I be using anyway? The basic questions: 1) which mail program should I be using under Leopard? Mail, Thunderbird, other? 2) Can I (easily) port my PC Eudora mail over to that program? 3) I need to clean/sort out my past 8 years of emails. Where in the process do I do that? and how? AKA, I can't figure out how it sort it out.

I've used Eudora for 7+ years and porting mail across several computers, from win98 to XP. I just bought a macbook pro and want to shift my life over to the macinverse. For the most part I can handle it. I am stumped on how to deal with email.

The basic questions:
1) which mail program should I be using under Leopard? Mail, Thunderbird, other?
2) Can I (easily) port my PC Eudora mail over to that program?
3) I need to clean/sort out my past 8 years of emails. Where in the process do I do that? and how?

Some background:
I sort my mail (of which I get several hundred emails a day) into many folder, based on topic, listserv, people, etc. and save it for historical reference (which I do frequently). Several years ago I got a laptop which ended up with several months of unique Eudora messages, but which otherwise is redundant in terms of emails, though to complicate things the filtering rules are not the same on desktop and laptop. The laptop downloads mail via IMAP, while the desktop is the POP3 email holder of record, save for those couple of months where I foolishly POP3ed on the laptop.

I just purchased a mac and will be using Leopard. I like the idea of using the Mail app for overall OS integration, but don't know if it can handle the load of email, 10 or so personalities with varying POP3 and IMAPs, and decent message sorting.

Which program should I use on the Mac and what is the process for porting email to the program of choice?

Now, for the biggie. This seems like a good time as any to recombine and resort my email archive. depending on the porting process, I need to decide if I should port one ginormous inbox containing 10s if not 100s of thousands of emails and do the new folders/filter rules on the mac or if I should do the sorting/refiltering on the PC and port over the folders and maybe the filter rules.

Historically Eudora hasn't had a way to sort through duplicates, so If I combine folders, I'll have tons of duplicates with no good way to get rid of them. This has stymied me in doing it in Eudora. I tried transferring my inbox to Thunderbird on the PC a year ago and that took many hours and I gave up and haven't tried since.

Where do I go from here?

Bonus question: I like having my email backed up somewhere besides the server (both for server space issues and for the use of the webmail interface, which is a pain with too many emails.). Should I POP3 to the macbook pro and trust in a nightly Time Machine backup or still archive my pop3 email archive either on the server or a PC desktop in Eudora?

Any help in sorting this out is greatly appreciated.

posted by bagelche to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Can't help with the importing from Eudora, but I've been using Mail.app for a few years with multiple mail accounts in a mix of POP3 & IMAP. No problems, apart from 1 odd IMAP account which doesn't like to update the message count properly all the time - but I think that's a server problem, as the other IMAP account is OK.

The filter rules in Mail.app are quite nice and easy to set up, though I don't do anything more complicated than a bit of folder-sorting and tagging. When I imported mine (one large mbox file), it didn't take long to run up new rules and sort 20k+ emails. Minutes, rather than hours. That was back in OS X 10.2.something.

Can't think of a way offhand to resolve duplicates, unless something can be done with message-ids.
posted by Pinback at 3:50 AM on November 3, 2007

I'd go with Mail.app if not just for the system integration and search with Spotlight. My Leopard Mail setup has just shy of 10,000 messages spread across and is "teh snappy".

Importing... Mail imports from Eudora just fine, but I'd advise you to first turn off Spotlight indexing of Mail and do your importing in 5k or 10k chunks. Turn Spotlight back on at the end and index them all in one-shot instead of trying to index and import.

Also run a test of Mail Scripts' Remove Duplicates. I haven't tested it under Leopard but it's very slick and could help you cut down on some of the mess.
posted by nathan_teske at 8:27 AM on November 3, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Thanks, pinback and nathan. I did start to look for duplicate-removing scripts for mail.app and am leaning in that direction. Dump what I can into maill.app, remove duplicates, and filter away. So far, I see no reason to embark on Thunderbird, unless someone can dissuade me from using mail.app.

Here's the note at the top of Mail Scripts page:
Due to changes in AppleScript, some of the scripts from the current version of Mail Scripts do not work in MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard). If you use Mail Scripts under 10.5, you understand that you do so at your own risk and that you might encounter random error messages or unexpected behavior.
I will update the scripts for full Leopard compatibility as soon as possible - however, I am not able to give a time estimate for when the new version will be available.
posted by bagelche at 8:44 AM on November 3, 2007

The main advantage of Thunderbird is that, like most open-source software, it's cross-platform; so if you switch to it now, you'll probably not have to switch to anything else again, regardless of what computer you end up using in future.
posted by flabdablet at 8:45 PM on November 3, 2007

I use Eudora for Mac (I like Mail.app but it runs like molasses compared to Eudora for large mailboxes) and have successfully "moved" Eudora from Mac to PC pretty easily just by copying the folder over. It's been a while, but I think what I did was install Eudora on Windows and input bogus settings (just to get it "set up"). Then I copied over the Mac mailbox files and I think that was pretty much it. You may be able to do the same in reverse.

Also, Eudora is supposed to be incorporated/reborn as some future version of Thunderbird so that might be something to consider.

Finally, if all else fails, I've found emailchemy to be a godsend for converting email between formats (Mac Eudora to Windows Outlook, for example). But you really shouldn't need it for Eudora.
posted by edjusted at 10:19 PM on November 3, 2007

emailchemy looks like a handy program. Good to know it's out there.

These are all quite reasonable suggestions and I haven't quite made up my mind which route to take. One thing I do know is that the new mac's CPU beats the pans off my last-millennium desktop, so I should probably do whatever processing I do on the new machine.

I'll experiment and note my results here for future reference.
posted by bagelche at 7:17 PM on November 6, 2007