After using some version or the other of Eudora for 10+ years, I'm
finally bailing to Thunderbird. (Heck, even the Eudora developers have
switched...)
Some notes in case other people are doing this:
1. Use Andreas Amann's "Eudora Mailbox Cleaner":
<http://homepage.mac.com/aamann/Eudora_Mailbox_Cleaner.html>
Thunderbird's im****ter gets hung up on invisible characters, etc. Also,
Eudora Mailbox Cleaner will move your attachments over.
2. If you have some very badly formatted email, even Eudora Mailbox
Cleaner will have trouble. This might show up as empty mailboxes. Of the
dozens of mailboxes I had, 12 had to be migrated by hand.
Some of these were my own fault. In the late 80's/early 90's, I had
the misguided notion that I could save disk space by running a script
that deleted all the extraneous header fields from my email.
Unfortunately, I considered "From:" and "Date:" extraneous. (Well, the
same information does appear on the initial "From " line of each email
message!)
Others were just plain mysterious. There was one mailbox with 2 short
messages that gave Eudora Mailbox Cleaner difficulties. I had to use
"formail" in Unix and a couple of Perl scripts to reformat the initial
"From " line for some of the larger mailboxes.
I think I have all my messages now. Can't be sure without looking at
every single one. I'll be saving my last Eudora mail folder for a long
long time.
3. There are lots of add-ons that make Thunderbird more useable for a
Eudora user (never mind Penelope). For example, "Show In/Out" will list
each message with a "Correspondent" --- this is the sender unless you
sent the message, then it's who you sent it to. This mimics the Eudora
behavior. Also, "Mailbox Alert" will play a sound when it finds new mail
in a designated mailbox. This can be used to approximate Eudora filters
that play a sound at the end --- close enough for me.
Weirdest thing I had to do? I had a custom "You have new mail" sound
that I've used since System 7.5.5 days. They were stuffed inside a
resource file in my mail folder. (Yes, Eudora 6.x in MacOS X will still
look inside the resource file and load these sounds.) I had to run
ResEdit under the Classic environment to retrieve this sound and convert
it to .wav format.
-R.
P.S. Why Thunderbird instead of Mail from MacOS X? Because Thunderbird
uses the Unix mbox format (pretty much) and even with DOS line endings,
I can still type "mail -f foo" to see the messages.
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