Mail Formats

Yesterday I got a crash-course in mail formats. I thought I knew a lot about email, from POP and IMAP servers to how SMTP functions. However, I had never considered how desktop clients operate after they retrieve mail from a server. I guess I had, rather naively, assumed that all desktop clients would save mail in the same manner. I was horrifically wrong. Now, this isn't to say that I'm completely clueless with mail clients. I commonly use Evolution on Linux and Windows Mail on Windows to handle mail on my personal computers. However, I'm typically feeding mail through webmail accounts and I configure them to retain messages in the webmail account, too. As such, I never needed to transfer mail between desktop clients in order to discover the painful differences between them.

This all stemmed from the fact that I gave my parents my old computer. (My new laptop arrived today! I'm sure I'll have a post about it once I become more familiar.) Despite the fact that I long ago tried to convince my parents to switch to a webmail account, they insist upon using email through whatever ISP they happen to have. This caused problems when they switched ISPs last summer since they no longer had access to their old email account. It caused problems again with switching computers because their ISP runs a pure POP server. Once messages are downloaded from the server by a user agent, they're deleted from the ISP's server and they can no longer be accessed aside from locally. So even though I was able to configure Evolution to work with their email, my parents had several messages stored via Outlook Express on their old machine. I had the task of transferring them.

I had previously transferred my parents' contacts, which was an amazingly simple task. I exported the contacts into a .csv file (Comma Seperated Values), Evolution read the file, and the contacts were successfully merged. I assumed something similar existed for their inbox. I was wrong. I actually had no idea how to export mail via Outlook Express. Some Google searches told me that the best way was to simply highlight the needed messages and then drag and drop them to another location (in this case a flash drive). This copied the messages individually as .eml files. Then I unmounted the flash drive from the older machine and mounted it on my previous desktop. I tried to simply import the files into Evolution but discovered that they were incompatible. Confused, I started to do more Google searches. Eventually, I learned that Evolution uses the .mbox format and it CAN'T understand the .eml format.

What I read suggested using Thunderbird, which had the ability to recognize the .eml format, and an extension for it to convert the files to .mbox format and then import those into Evolution. However, there were only 5 messages that my parents really wanted so I decided to cut a few corners. I installed Thunderbird and configured it to work with their ISP's SMTP server. Then I opened the .eml files and used Thunderbird to email them from my parents' email account to my parents' email account. So I basically made my parents' email themselves with the messages they needed. Once I did that, I closed Thunderbird and relaunched Evolution, where the 5 messages were waiting in the Inbox. I saw it as my spot of cleverness in the day.