[Users] [Bulk] Re: Migrating emails and emails folders from "Mozilla Thunderbird" to "Claws Mail"

[Steve Litt]

On Sat, 30 Jun 2012 11:02:06 -0400, Dan Arico said:
> 
> > If I had to do migration again, I'd do it the same way as before:
> > I'd copy from the source client to an IMAP account, and then from
> > the IMAP to Claws. Or, in my case, I didn't do the last step -- I
> > just kept all my email on my local IMAP server, and that IMAP
> > server's Maildir structure is what I back up.
> > 
> > I tried for a few weeks to export and import from files, and man, it
> > was very bad news. Only after I committed to the IMAP middleman did
> > things go well.
> > 
> > The whole process is described here:
> > 
> > http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/201202/201202.htm
> 
> I found a python script called maildir2mbox.py that solved my problem
> when I converted from Kmail to Claws. It converted thousands of emails
> without a hiccup.
> 
> Dan Arico

In Kmail I had a mixture of probably 50 Mboxes and 50 Maildirs. Ugh!

In retrospect I probably could have done what you did, had I known
which email client I would end up using. My first choice was actually
MH (http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/index.html#toc), which is why I
wanted mh folders instead of maildir or mbox, and that's what
originally led me to Sylpheed and Claws.

Try as I might, I could find no scripts, that actually worked, to
convert maildir and mbox to mh. Meanwhile, I couldn't upgrade my aging
Ubuntu until I escaped from Kmail, because Ubuntu 11.10 used (ugh)
Kmail2.

At a meeting after the meeting for GoLUG (http://www.golug.org),
several friends took me aside and gave me an intervention. They
explained that my search for scripts that provably worked was the
highway to heartache, and that the whole thing could be accomplished by
using IMAP as a middleman. They further explained that by actually
keeping the emails on a local IMAP, I could avoid this heartache every
time I changed email clients, because, in the words of the Oriental
Philosopher, "This too will change."

So I did as they said, and it worked out beautifully, except for the
fact that, as far as I know, you can't use MH scripts on IMAP stored
email. But big deal, I'd long before given up the hope of using MH
scripts as my email client.

Kmail has caused more people more grief than almost any other free
software I can think of. It's soooooo good to have Kmail in my rear
view mirror.

SteveT

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