Re: Eudora to Thunderbird

Jon Johnsen wrote:
>
> To comply with campus minimum security standards, we will soon
> be changing the email client we support for our users from Eudora to (we
> hope) Thunderbird.
>
> This presents the challenge of moving mailboxes, address books,
> and filters from Eudora to Thunderbird. Our initial research and
> testing hasn’t left us thrilled with the project. /(We keep our users’
> mailboxes on a file server, not on the users’ local computers.)
>
> / Can anyone suggest a source of information which will assist
> us? Has anyone already successfully completed such a migration?

Filters: I have not seen any method to migrate filters from Eudora to
Thunderbird.

Mailboxes: Sometimes they work fine. Sometimes Eudora Mailbox Cleaner
helps <http://homepage.mac.com/aamann/Eudora_Mailbox_Cleaner.html>.
Sometimes they still don't work even with EMC; we're trying to isolate
the problem. (The problem is probably that Eudora's mailbox format is
really broken).

Address books: Sometimes they come over with no problems. Sometimes EMC
brings them over with no problems. Sometimes EMC creates an
EMC-import.mab file in the correct place, but Thunderbird doesn't
recognize it (but if you rename it to abook.mab, it works). Sometimes
even after running through EMC it doesn't work on complicated address
books (meta-data in the wrong fields). It appears to work better on
Windows Thunderbird than on Mac Thunderbird, and we've had some success
for Mac users transferring the Eudora files to Windows (through a
process which alters linefeeds to be native), migrating to Windows
Thunderbird, and then moving it back to the Mac.

It's definitely not clean. And some users will definitely grumble, even
if you can migrate all their stuff cleanly.

We have some user-oriented documentation up at
<http://ls.berkeley.edu/lscr/advice/email/thunderbird/>.

-- 
Tom Holub (tom_at_LS.Berkeley.EDU, 510-642-9069)
Director of Computing, College of Letters & Science
249 Campbell Hall
<http://LS.berkeley.edu/lscr/>

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