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Importing Mails from Eudora to Opera's M2

Posted at April 11, 2004 12:34 (UTC) from London, UK

Importing mails from Eudora to Opera's M2 is still a bit tricky at the moment. There are two main problems, which makes the import to M2 quite difficult or messy, respectively.
The first one is, that Eudora stores all attachments in a separate directory, however, M2 uses the "traditional" MBOX format. Due to this, all attachments have to copied back into the mailbox files. The second problem is, that Eudora uses particular tags formatting the mail's body. These tags cannot bet interpreted by M2.

This short tutorial deals about how to steer clear theses obstacles. See for yourself!

1.) Make a copy of your current Eudora mail directory, subsequently referred to as 'MAIL', and also make a new shortcut for Eudora with this new directory as mail storage: Start Eudora with this shortcut. Eudora works now on that mail storage directory for that shortcut. An example for the target of the shortcut could be:

'C:\Programme\Qualcomm\Eudora6\Eudora.exe C:\Mail'

Tip:

Switch off the checking or receiving of new mails. This prevents receipt of new mails during the entire migration process and saves a possible loss of some mails.

2.) If there are no other sent mails in any mailbox except the 'Out' mailbox, then continue with 3., else continue here:

2a) Create a mailbox called 'out-tmp' and move all your mails from the 'Out' mailbox to here.

2b) With the help of the search dialogue look for all mails which have the status 'sent'.

2c) Move all the found mails from 2b) to the mailbox 'out-tmp', too.

2d) If there other mails still exist you have sent one day but the mails no longer have the status 'sent', move them all to the 'out-tmp' mailbox, too.

2e) Close Eudora and change to the MAIL directory.

2f) Delete all with Out.*, this should usually be only 'Out.mbx' and 'Out.toc'.

2g) Rename 'out-tmp.mbx' to 'Out.mbx' and delete 'out-tmp.toc'.

2h) Restart Eudora with the help of the corresponding shortcut, created in 1. Eudora might warn you, that it has to rebuild the index files for the Out-Mailbox. Confirm this with 'Yes' and close the following dialogue with 'OK'.

2i) Make sure, that all your mails are visible in the 'Out' mailbox again. All those mails do not have the status 'sent' anymore, but this will be corrected later.

3.) Make sure that none of your mailbox's or folder's name contains / (Slash) or #. If this is the case, please rename them. It is also recommended to do this, if the name contains non standard English letters like the German umlauts: Ä, Ö, Ü.

4.) Install and start the tool "Emailchemy" - registration required, otherwise Emailchemy will replace all Subject and From headers with the hint that you should register.

5.) Change under 'Edit --> Preferences' at 'Nested Output' the mailbox extension from .mailbox to .mbx. (without the last dot )

6.) Close with 'Save' and start the 'Conversion Wizard'.

7.) Now, choose in the list 'Eudora for Windows' and confirm with 'Next'.

8.) Select the MAIL directory (created in 1.) via the 'Browse' button.

9.) Confirm the possible warning with 'YES'.

10.) A dialogue is opened now where you have to type in the folder's name, where the converted mailboxes shall be stored. For example, enter 'mail-rfc', subsequently referred to as 'MAIL-RFC'. Remember to choose the correct file type 'Standard Mailboxes (RFC-822 mbox) - Nested'. Close the dialogue with 'Save'. EMailchemy starts to convert your mailboxes now. This can take some time depending on the speed of your computer, how many mails you have and how large the attachements are.

11.) Once Emailchemy has finished converting the mails, there are still the so called MIME-Types of the attachment to be corrected. Emailchemy sets the MIME-Type of each attachment to "application/octed-stream" by default. However, this prevents by Opera's M2 recognizing, for example, an attachment as a picture and showing it in the mail correctly. Furthermore, M2 wouldn't be able to show mails in the right filters for pictures, videos, documents, etc. if the MIME-Type is not set excactly. To fix this, you can use the little tool I have written: 'MimeTypeConverter'.

You need to use it as follows (requires installed Java >= 1.3):

a) Download the file 'mime-type-converter.jar' by the link given above and save the file to MAIL-RFC.

b) Start with 'java -jar mime-type-converter.jar MAIL-RFC', where MAIL-RFC points to your directory containing the converted mailboxes, for example:

'java -jar mime-type-converter.jar c:\mail-rf'

c) Repeat this step under b) for each sub-folder of MAIL-RFC so that each of your mailboxes will be fixed.

12.) Create now another shortcut as described under 1., however, this time with MAIL-RFC instead of MAIL.

13.) Change to the directory MAIL-RFC and rename all sub-folders by appending '.fol' to each of them (if any exist), e.g. rename 'Info' to 'Info.fol'.

14.) Start Eudora now with the shortcut created under 12. Now, Eudora rebuilds the index files for the 'In' and 'Out' mailboxes at first. Furthermore, it opens a wizard window, which asks you to create a new mail account. Please do this right here now. You can choose dummy information to enter, e.g. enter 'mail' in each text field, that's enough. However, it is important to create an account or the import into M2 cannot take place later.

15.) Now, open ALL of your mailboxes, one after another thus Eudora starts to create a new index file for each of your mailboxes. Don't worry that your mails look a bit shifted.

16.) Close Eudora.

17.) Start MBXTools.exe with MAIL-RFC as the argument, e.g. 'C:\>MBXTools.exe c:\mail-rfc'. Make sure, that behind each mailbox you can see the number of mails contained in this mailbox. If this is not the case, then Eudora has not created the index file for that mailbox properly.

18.) Select the Out mailbox and click on the button 'Mark All Sent' at the top. Thus, all mails are marked as sent now and will be imported into M2 correctly and shown in the 'Sent' folder as well.

Well, now importing to M2:

19.) Start M2 and create a new email account unless you haven't previously done this already.

20.) Now, choose 'Mail --> New account... --> Import Mails --> Import from Eudora".

21.) Select with 'Browse' the directory MAIL-RFC.

22.) Select at 'Import into' that account, where you want to import your mails into. This has influence on M2's filter behavior when using the 'Account-Selector' to show mails belonging to a specific account only.

23.) At 'Import items' choose the right one(s) you want to import. Usually this will be all your mailboxes, thus just select the item .

24.) Start the import by clicking on 'Import'.


25.) Have a lot of fun with M2 and enjoy its new pretty nice features!

London at Night

Posted at April 11, 2004 11:45 (UTC) from London, UK

In December 2003, on my night tour through London to see a couple of the illuminated landmarks during Brightening up London, there are now also some other pictures of London by Night.

Amongst others, these pictures show the Houses of Parliament, St. Stephan's Clock Tower housing the world-famous bell "Big Ben", different views of the City of London over the river Thames.

To see the photos, just click here.

Brightening up London

Posted at April 11, 2004 11:30 (UTC) from London, UK
Throughout December 2003 Ten Alps and Orange has been producing 'Brightening Up London,' which had seen nine major buildings lit up with multiple projections of images created by celebrities such as artist Damien Hirst. The event was fully funded by mobile phone company Orange, and the budget is of a material level to Ten Alps events company.

Brightening Up London had seen Nigella Lawson, photographer David Bailey and designer Stella McCartney creating their own images for projection onto some of London’s most famous landmarks including Wellington Arch, National Gallery, National Theatre, Tate Britain and Imperial War Museum.

More photos can be seen here.