Sunday, May 30, 2010

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner (updated)

I've been using Eudora email app since Steve Jobs wore short pants. Many high-volume mail users have, due to Eudora's flexibility and good search abilities. But unfortunately the app is not longer supported or updated. And my copy started corrupting mailboxes more and more often, so I was forced to find a new mail home.

I was dreading it, because I have over ten years of mail stored, and dozens of filter, many mail boxes, hundreds of addresses and nicknames, a half-dozen email addresses at various places, keyboard shortcuts, macros, blah-blah-blah... You see what I mean?

Fortunately when googling for it, the first page I found was about Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. It made the bulk of the work a matter of just dragging the Eudora folder on top of the EMC icon.
It did take a long time (hours) due to my hundreds of thousands of archived messages, but I just lay back and watched 30Rock.

Afterwards I had to get used to a new app (I had chosen Apple Mail over Mozilla Thunderbird because I didn't like the interface of the latter, and because for once it would be nice to actually be using the app that Apple assumes you're using, so you get the benefits they build into the system for it.), and I had to reestablish my accounts, which for some reason are not transferred (and were not meant to), but both things where not so bad as I may have feared.

And delightfully, it now seems I have virtually everything I needed, filters, nicks, addresses, boxes, etc etc. And I can work almost like I am used to, perhaps even with a few improvements (which I surely will find more of).

Apple "Mail" (what's with the over-generic product names, folks?) does have a weakness though. If I want to search for a specific person, that's easy. Or a specific subject. But in Mail I can't search for both at once, so it's much harder to nail down on a specific mail you need to find. I hope they improve that.

Update:
Hi Eolake,
I had a bunch of Eudora files left over from about 10 years ago, and I have had it in the back of my mind for a long time to find some way to recover them. Last year, a friend who had emailed me a copy of a novel he wrote in 1998 asked me if I still had it. He had lost or misplaced his last copies when he was forced to move quickly and put a whole bunch of stuff in storage where he hasn't been able to sort it. Well, I couldn't read the Eudora files to find out. Until this afternoon, when I downloaded EMC and ran it and watched it just work. I found the novel and emailed it back to him. He was quite pleased.

So, thanks from two of us for solving my problem for me. I doubt I would have even worked on this for the next couple of years without your recommendation. (I did send the guy a donation with my thanks.)
Pat

----
Thanks also to those helping with the Search issue. (Further, I have bought and I'm studying Take Control of Apple Mail in Snow Leopard.)

BTW, does anybody know how to get Mail to open the next message automatically when you delete one which is open? Update: silly me, I just made a macro for it, took me thirty seconds.

4 comments:

inshousi said...

"But in mail I can't search for both at once..."

If that is a typo for an uppercase 'M' then a SmartMailbox [menu Mailbox : New Smart Mailbox] will do that for you. If it isn't a typo you've lost me. While your getting up to speed with searching, this may help:

http://thurly.net//nxt

inshousi said...

Think outside the mailbox too: Spotlight (can? does? dunno if I had to set it up that way) will index your mailboxes, and will do the search you require. You can even do it without having Mail running.

A final thought: if your email messages are mission critical, I would advise an industrial strength database application to archive and backup. I use EagleFiler, and also recommend MailSteward.

inshousi said...

If you have Spotlight turned off (not the case if you are able to do 'Entire message' searches, which uses the Spotlight index) you may want to try Rocketbox (which does not use the Spotlight index):

http://www.centralatomics.com/index.html

One user is trying it for the reason above, but I have not heard back. It's usually a good sign when users are not whining. I have tried it myself, and it seemed to work well, but the trial was too short to find any potential shortcomings.

OK, I'm done.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Thanks guys.
Spotlight has always confused me, so that may be why I overlooked it as an option.
(I will also look into the smart boxes. I have bought "Take Control of Mail in Snow Leopard".)