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."

Comments

It'll fail

[dtfinch]

to import folders with a '/' in the name.

To lazy to jump through the hoops of bugzilla.

Re:It'll fail

[Myen]

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)

Hmm...

[JoeLinux]

Sort of like Bug-Stock. A day-long festival of software, testing, and resolution.

Sort of like Woodstock, except without all the kick-ass music, sex, drugs and alcohol. Hmm...never mind.

Continual thought process in Doom3: "Where is the bad-guy going to pop up next? bullets be damned, I'm running out of clean shorts!"

Re:Huh?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

So I should switch from a fully functional, secure, fast, and stable email client (Outlook) to some pile of shit just because you are having a special day for it?

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.

Too slow and no YEnc!

[applef00]

I tried Thunderbird, but as a newsreader it sucked. Didn't handle multipart messages very well at all and had no support for YEncode (I don't care that it's not an official standard--it's a defacto standard which is extremely widely used and that's what counts). Without YEnc support, it's basically useless to me as a newsreader. It was also just too damned slow.

I love Firefox, though! Great browser. Small, fast, etc., etc. Thunderbird just needs some more work before it's really there, IMO.

Re:Too slow and no YEnc!

[Magila]

I don't think thunderbird was ever meant to be a alt.binaries.* downloader, there's plently of other readers made specificaly for downloading warez from usenet.

Thunderbird on TheOpenCD

[HenrikOxUK]

Rumor is that Thunderbird and Firefox are hidden away somewhere on the soon to be released version of TheOpenCD. This special edition (1.4.1) will be handed out to an unsuspecting public at 17 different locations around the world (and counting) on Software Freedom Day, August 28th along with a custom version of Knoppix. About 10.000 copies are being produced. The new edition might even be out by Tuesday ...

Re:Huh?

[NanoGator]

"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."

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 .EXE.

(For the record, I did have a chuckle at this comment. ;))

cross platform offline e-mailing

[ongeboren]

I'm actually interested in reading the same e-mails on my dual-boot machine (windows + linux). It's very time consuming to have to switch to linux to find some important e-mail, because you have it in your linux e-mail client.

As mozilla is a cross platform application, it should be able to work with the same offline e-mails.. lets say stored in a fat32 partition, so we could write to it from linux as from windows.

Any suggestions how to do this?

Re:cross platform offline e-mailing

[Dreadlord]

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.

Re:cross platform offline e-mailing

[r.jimenezz]

Take a look at

http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/share_mail.html

HTH :)

Re:cross platform offline e-mailing

[Osty]

If you ISP's mailserver offer IMAP, then you can access the e-mail from both linux/windows since the e-mail is stored on the server. You might run out of space on the server if you get many e-mails and don't delete so often. Several e-mail clients can be configured to download the entire message, in case the mailserver is not accessible.

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!

Re:cross platform offline e-mailing

[ticktockticktock]

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.

Don't forget to install enigmail too!

[Nelson]

Get it here and PGP/GPG all your messages, at the very least start signing them.

How about from Thunderbird on another HD?

[sahonen]

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?

Re:Great!

[gnu-generation-one]

For anyone seriously needing to migrate from a webmail provider, there are various Perl tools such as yahoo mail downloader.

If your favourite web-based data source doesn't already have a tool to access it using Perl, there are also web-scraper modules (and LWP) which make it easy to build your own. Remember to put it on CPAN if you create something new.

Re:Thunderbird Rules!

[Anonymous Coward]

For example.. lets say my address is monkey@asdfgbe.com. A bot would be able to pick this up in a heartbeat, (they use google, as well as search various news sites such as slashdot) and add me to a spam list.

Thanks, asshat. Try "example.com" next time. That's what it's for.

- Monkey
AsdFgBe, Inc.

It's time to play...

[Flower]

FIND! THE! FALLACY!!!!!

Today's example comes from /. regular Kenshin with the mighty, mighty low ID of 43036! Here he tries to compare a volunteer software bug hunt with yet another deeply flawed automotive analogy. So let's get started and bring in some contestants from our studio audience to play....

FIND! THE! FALLACY!!!! <cue to commercial>

Please fix Outlook import

[lelitsch]

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 support for going to and fro would be nice

[rsilvergun]

Just finished moving my mom to Thunderbird... from Mozilla mail. Some of the folders came from Kmail (standard unix mailbox format imported into Kmail from Outlook, it's a long story), and I used a CD to move them, meaning they had the read-only bit set without me realizing it (I forgot, sue me). Still, for reasons I cannot fathom, Mozilla Mail stopped displaying mail in about half the folders, even after clearing the read-only bit. The messages where there (I could see them in Thunderbird), they just didn't show up in Mozilla. I got everything working under Thunderbird, and tried copying over the Mail folder, no dice. Heck, on one of the folders I can see one message and nothing else. It's a real mess. At the momemt I've got her mail shortcut launching Thunderbird instead of Mozilla mail, but it really bugs me, since don't know if the mail is gonna stop working.

Re:Migrated from Mozilla to Thunderbird...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about Thunderbird Windows to Thunderbird Linux?

Why is there not a way to import Thunderbird mailboxes? You can try moving the profile by hand, and in doing so get a completely unusable email client.

I would like to "Export to archive", and giving the options for archive email folders [option to skip junk], address book, pop/smtp settings, Signatures, all to a *single* .tgz. Leave out the "profile bits" like theme.

This file should be importanble cross platofrm by all Thunderbird clients.

All it would take would be a single xml file to "describe" the contents of the tar file, where you have most [cross platform bits] of your profile directory.

Why Not to Switch...yet

[blahbooboo2]

I am a big fan of Mozilla Firebird, and I am starting to play with Thunderbird. HOWEVER, what makes me hesitate using Thunderbird is that once you go to Thunderbird and if you don't like it you can't go back to your old program. Why? Because there is no export ability of your messages and address book, nor do any other major programs import these two items from Thunderbird. Please correct me if I am wrong as I would love to give Thunderbird a serious try.

Pegasus

[rueger]

Well to start with it appears that there no way to move several years of Pegasus data into Thunderbird. In terms of features, it seems to have less than Pegasus, as well as lacking some things that I would really like - such as an integrated hot-syncable calendar and easy filter setup. (which I admit Eudora does pretty well).

My guess is that Thunderbird will eventually approach the feature set that is available elsewhere, and I may move over to a Firefox/Thunderbird combo, but it'll be a while yet.

Re:Back up your messages!

[LupusUF]

"If you plan to participate in this. Please remember to back up your email in case something goes wrong."

Wow, that is a great way to get a +3 informative.

Let me try:

Before you try to check for new messages, make sure that you are connected to the internet.