Re: How to convert Thunderbird folder to RMAIL?

[Xah]

Kynn wrote:

> Hi.  I have a Thunderbird folder with about 700 mail messages that
> I'd like to convert to a format importable by RMAIL.  Does anyone
> have any idea of how to do that?
>
> FWIW, my OS is Mac OS X.

I've done exporting/importing my mails about every 2 years since about
1995, but the last time i did this was before 2002 though.

if you hope to get 100% correct transfer, that's pretty hopeless. In
short, most mail formats are not well specified or at all. Each mail
program that sports the “import from another mail program” feature is
pretty much heuristics. You always ends up losing some info (such as
date, reply relation, read/unread etc), or screwed up some formatting
or attachement in some mails. Even transition from Apple Mail program
from version to version is rocky...

sorry to be no help except rant.

If Thumderbird is still using some sort of mbox format... one route
you could try is to convert them using nmh, then i'm guessing there's
tool somewhere that converts nmh to rmail. If things haven't changed
in 10 years, then rmail, gnus, xemacs's vm, all uses mutually
incompatible formats.

if possible, you might just leave your Thurderbird's mymail.msf as
plain text archive of your past emails. (i'd split it into file-per-
email with nmh though) Start afresh with whatever mail program you'll
be using.

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox

“Unix and the mbox Email Format”
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/mbox_format.html
(warning, anti-unix screed)

  Xah
  xah@xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄