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Mass Migration/Bughunt For Thunderbird Tuesday
maggeth writes "mozillaZine is spreading the word of a plan to have a mass migration of users from other email clients on this coming Tuesday in order to find any remaining bugs in the migration process. 'Bring your Outlook, Eudora, Mozilla, Outlook Express, and Communicator e-mail clients with you and join us on IRC for a day of testing the Thunderbird migration features. The goal is to get as many testing migrations performed on as many clients and as many operating systems as possible and to discuss and record all the problems in Bugzilla.' Read the full article for more details and for the IRC location."
If you plan to participate in this. Please remember to back up your email in case something goes wrong.
Well, I have certainly had problems with the import facility in both Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird. I put up with the problems because I love the applications but at times they are a nuisance.
Importing csv or tab delimited files always seems very confusing compared to trying it in Outlook Express - I had to use OE recently as an intermediate step between getting email addresses from OS X to Thunderbird. (Importing directly from OS X would be really useful too.)
As an aside, if dragging and dropping addresses from addr. book onto Thunderbird's Send-To section, it works great except that dropping addresses onto a BCC field subsequently changes the 'next entry' field back to "To:" which is a nuisance.
Also, the scroll wheel seems to corrupt a long list of addresses entered in the 'Send-To' section.
I hope this is of some use to a developer somewhere!
Thanks.
Karma? Sorry, i don't believe in superstition. http://talk.thinkingmatters.org.nz
"While we test our pile of shit, could you please ask the maker of your fully functional secure fast and stable email client to disable the feature that sends me spam each time some script kiddy mails you an .exe attachment? Thank you."
.EXE.
;))
Sorry to suck the fun out of your witty comment here, but please don't confuse Outlook for Outlook Express. OL still has the occasional exploit, but it is nowhere near as bad as OLE. In all seriousness, with OLXP (released in 02 I think) you have to hack the registry to even get it to download an
(For the record, I did have a chuckle at this comment.
"Derp de derp."
Get it here and PGP/GPG all your messages, at the very least start signing them.
I recently upgraded my computer from 98 to 2000 on another hard drive. Took me forever to figure out how to get my old email into Thunderbird on the new hard drive. Shouldn't this be just slightly easier?
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
put your mbox file into /var/mail/USERNAME
then set mozilla up to fetch from localhost
Quite easy to do, I used to do so when I had a Windows parition, run Thunderbird with the profile manager:
Start > Run: thunderbird -ProfileManager (under Windows)
$ thunderbird -ProfileManager (under Linux)
Create a new profile, select a directory for the profile on a FAT partition, then create email accounts, and import email (if any).
Now on the other OS, run Thunderbird with the profile manager again, create a new profile, select the same directory, you are set.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
why do you think it takes so long to load?
http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/share_mail.html
HTH :)
The revolution will not be televised.
It's only a pedantic point, but Thunderbird does actually support YEnc. However, as you say, it doesn't work with multiparts (including messages in YEnc multipart format with only 1 part), so the support isn't much use...
I'd migrate to Thunderbird in a second and take a lot of colleagues with me if only it would finally not crash when trying to import nontrivial amounts of email from Outlook (not Outlook Express). Thunderbird is fine up to a few thousand messages, but anyting larger gets you a never ending onslaught of error messages.
Better yet, get yourself a cheap old computer, set it up with linux, a good MTA (exim, postfix, qmail), an imap server, and fetchmail. Use that machine to fetch all of your mail from your ISP, in which case it won't matter if the ISP uses POP3 or IMAP. Then set up your mail clients on your dual-boot box to point to your local mail cache instead of your ISP. You can even setup the mail clients to use the local server to send mail, if you like. There'll be a small delay in receiving mail this way, though you can setup fetchmail to poll more often if you like, but I've never found that to be a problem. Finally, you can also setup a good spam solution like SpamAssassin and solve your spam problems in a single place rather than relying on the varying spam features of your different email clients (assuming they even have spam features, unlike a lot of console-based clients like pine or mutt).
There are more benefits for running your own server like this, too. It doesn't have to function solely as a mail machine. You could install Squid and an ad-killing plugin like AdZapper, and use the box as a web proxy. You could setup NAT and a DHCP server and have yourself an internal network that will support N clients, all with ineternet access, without having to buy a pre-packaged router (and you can do this with a single dialup connection, if you can't get broadband -- I don't know of any consumer routers you can buy that will dial on demand for you). You can firewall your entire internal network from a single point. You could add a wireless access point for cheaper than it would cost to buy a wireless router, plug it into a port on your switch, and have an instant wireless network. Setup samba and have an internal file share network. The sky (and hardware you have available) is the limit!
Texturizer's FAQ is outdated since Thunderbird 0.7 when it comes to the need to hand modify the paths in prefs.js. Thunderbird 0.7 and newer support relative profile directories so you no longer have to hand-modify the prefs.js with new paths everytime you move the profile around, which also means you can load a windows-generated profile directly in the linux version of Thunderbird without making a single hand-modification to prefs.js. All you have to do is start thunderbird with the "-P" option and point it to the path where your profile is in windows. Once done, any changes to anything (new/deleted mailboxes, account settings, and other preferences) in the linux version will be visible in the windows version.
Please see bug 3157 on bugzilla.m.o
Fix was chcked in near 2004-07-16 - any nightly / milestone after that should work (excluding the security updates; that's from different code)
Thunderbird stores emails in mbox/mbx format, which is just a plain text file. Many email clients and even some mail servers use this format and converters exist as well. So although there's no export feature, and few if any clients have specific features for importing from Thunderbird, moving your email over shouldn't pose serious difficulty. I had to research this because we're trying out Thunderbird where I work.
The best workaround I have found is to set up Mercury, point that at your Pegasus data, and temporarily add an extra Imap server to Thunderbird (which actually points at localhost running mercury).
Then when you've finished moving things around, get rid of Mercury and the associated server entry in Thunderbird.
TNEF encoded emails won't even open in Outlook Express, because Microsoft wants you to have another incentive to buy Office. Anyone sending them should immediately stop for the sake of their own reputation. They probably send out emails all the time and wonder why they don't get replies, or why people tell them all they got was garbage. Sometimes all that gets through is a blank email, with the attachments stripped. It's very easy to configure Outlook to send standard emails, and to not do so looks unprofessional to anyone recieving the email who doesn't have Outlook.
It's not a trivial "bug" to fix, as intended by Microsoft. It will at minimum require embedding a TNEF decoder and an RTF to HTML converter. But few of either exist that are considered mature or secure enough for such a widely used program like Mozilla, and are license compatible.
The Mozilla team is known for trying to avoid anything they consider to be proprietary. Any requests falling under this category are classified as "tech evangelism".
Patents are a bit of a concern. It's hard to tell what is and isn't patented nowadays, but with most standards comes the assurance that you are safe from patent claims by the submitter of the standard. Which may partly explain Mozilla's reluctance to support anything proprietary.