Migrating out of Eudora, to IMAP

Chris Pepper (apparently) - 08:40am May 24, 2006 PST
via email

        As I've discussed several times in this forum, I keep my
Eudora Folder on an iPod. I have used Zip disks, Orb drives, a 2.5"
FireWire drive, and iPods (including a shuffle). The advantage to
this is that I don't have to carry a whole computer around, but still
get all my email state (including open windows, window positions, and
labels) on whatever Mac I'm using.

        Now that I have laptops both at work and home, though, being
tethered to the iPod is a real nuisance, and it prevents me from
listening to the iPod except when travelling to/from work, since it's
always mounted on one computer or another.

        I thought a flash drive would be small and unobtrusive enough
that I could ignore it when using or moving a laptop, but the write
performance was unacceptable -- I get new email all day long, and
flash write speed just stank.

        The 'proper' solution is IMAP, and I finished moving all my
email (except a couple hundred messages which fail to transfer)
months ago. The process was long, difficult, and ugly, due to Eudora
crashes, lost information (dates and BCCs on sent mail), sorting
oddities (if you ever do this yourself, transfer messages in forward
chronological order, as they would normally arrive; Eudora defaults
to reverse-chronological, which violates a SquirrelMail assumption),
but it is done.

        I've been running in this hybrid state, where Eudora has the
'real' copy of my mailbox, but I can use SquirrelMail when Eudora
(the iPod) is unavailable. I've recently started trying Mozilla
Thunderbird on work's MBP, and it seems fine. Interestingly, Eudora
doesn't always mark messages as read -- looking at my mailboxes in
Tbird, I find a bunch of messages marked unread on the server, but
read in Eudora. This is annoying, but fixable.

        I may have found the missing link today. I use Eudora's
labels extensively, to track messages which require further action or
contain important information. The problem is Eudora's IMAP
implementation doesn't store all 15 labels on the server, and Eudora
doesn't offer direct access to IMAP's Flagged attribute (the simpler
alternative which is part of the IMAP standard). Today's discovery is
that "Label 15" *does* map to the IMAP Flag field. It's even
configurable! Fortunately, I can get by with a single label/flag, so
this works for me.

><x-eudora-setting:32629> The label to assign to IMAP messages marked
>as FLAGGED on the server. Set to 0 to ignore the FLAGGED state.

        Apparently labels are a hot topic for others as well. One
particular Thunderbird bug report on labels (with some IMAP
discussion) has 94 comments, and there are other related reports...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114656
http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap/isps/#keywords

        I am now in the process relabeling all my Eudora messages.
Then I have to move stuff from my local Out box to my IMAP Sent
folder, and I'll see how Thunderbird compares to Eudora...


                                                Chris Pepper
--
Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/>
Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>