Apple Mail in Tiger can kiss it
Man. So I’m migrating my data from Mac OS X to Debian, right, and it is time to move my mbox files over. Wrong! Tiger silently upgraded my mail files to some bastardized, proprietary format Apple has invented for use with Spotlight. Each message is in a single file (maildir, anyone?) that has this proprietary, undocumented format.
Thanks to Google I found this one solution to convert the .emlx files back to mbox, Emailchemy. Heck yeah, I’ll give some guy US$25 to get my years of mail data back into an open format.
Good grief, I cannot wait to have everything back in Debian. The funny thing is, even users wanting to move from a Tiger install to any previous OS X version would face this same issue.
Hmmm…
Why spend $25 on some software exploiting desperation, when a simple solution (at least for a person touching Debian) may be at hand, using standards?
Does Apple Mail support IMAP servers ?
If yes, install a temporary IMAP4rev1 server on a spare machine I am sure you must have, create an account on Apple Mail, then drag&drop all your email in that account.
Bam ! All email available for any other Email client supporting IMAP4!
And most IMAP daemons actually use Maildirs, so your server will also most probably have a nice Maildir directory full of your emails somewhere.
:)
This is how I deal with legacy stuff, like big fat M$ Outlook .pst files. I’m going to help a friend tonight (Outlook to Apple Mail, heh!) tonight, with a P2 400 MHz / 128 MB RAM notebook and Courier-IMAP.
Nico
Comment by Nico — July 27, 2005 @ 9:19 am
I am pretty dumb, if you find an IMAP daemon for OS X, you do not even need another machine…
Comment by Nico — July 27, 2005 @ 9:28 am
Using dovecot-imap, you can choose mbox or maildir as the format on the server.
Comment by Nico — July 27, 2005 @ 9:33 am
Nico, thanks for the information! I will be getting up to speed on running my own IMAP as my servers come along. See you on the Planet ;-).
Comment by Barry Hawkins — July 27, 2005 @ 11:52 am
$ sudo apt-get install courier-imapand you will be about done ;o)
As seeing me on the Planet, I’m just a reader and Debian user…
Comment by Nico — July 27, 2005 @ 12:02 pm
[…] ies Not a chance It is because I keep coming across stories like […]
Pingback by Floating Sun » Blog Archive » Not a chance — July 27, 2005 @ 6:36 pm
So, yesterday evening I went to my friend’s place with my old crappy notebook.
$ sudo apt-get install dovecot-imap$ sudo vi /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
I said I wanted IMAP in a Maildir in the home directory (see /usr/share/doc/dovecot-*).
$ sudo invoke-rc.d dovecot stop && sudo invoke-rc.d dovecot startVoila! IMAP server installed, configured and running.
I setup Outlook with the new Account and drag/dropped the emails to the notebook.
I setup Mail.App on the Mac with the new IMAP account, drag/drop…
Back to the notebook:
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge dovecot-imap dovecot-common$ rm -r ~/Maildir
I also removed the certs left behind for IMAPS, and I was done !
Total migration time: 20mn for many hundreds of emails in many folders.
No traces left anywhere. No pain.
I also confirmed that Tiger’s DHCP client makes D-Link crappy “router” reboot when requesting an IP address… Ugly thing IMO.
Comment by Nico — July 28, 2005 @ 9:21 am
>I also confirmed that Tigerâs DHCP client makes D-Link crappy ârouterâ
>reboot when requesting an IP address⦠Ugly thing IMO.
The default computer name Apple picks, causes a buffer overflow on the d-link.
Reliably. :-( You can change the name under Prefs -> Sharing.
Comment by Jason Fesler — August 13, 2006 @ 11:08 am