Matt Hovey, the developer of an amazing email format conversion application called Emailchemy has written a nice piece explaining why was driven to create the app.

Hawk Wings has covered Emailchemy before.

It can convert emails and mailboxes from an astonishing number of email clients (AOL for Windows, Claris Emailer, CompuServe Classic for Macintosh, CompuServe 2000 for Windows, Entourage (Database, .rge Archives and cache files), Eudora, Mail.app, Mozilla, Mulberry, Musashi, Neoplanet, Netscape, Opera, Outlook for Windows, Outlook Express for Macintosh, Windows and UNIX/Solaris, PowerTalk/AOCE for Macintosh, QuickMail Pro for Macintosh and Windows, Thunderbird, Yahoo! Mail and any other UNIX-style or mbox-format mailbox—whew!) into “mbox” format, mail spool, or “UNIX-style” mailboxes, folders of individual email files (.txt or .eml files), comma-separated value files (.csv files), IMAPdir (Binc IMAP maildir) or Maildir++ (Courier IMAP maildir) format, or IMAP formats usable by Outlook, Outlook Express, Entourage, Mail.app, and Thunderbird.

Matt recounts how he moved from his beginnings in mail on UNIX (in 1990, when I was still fooling around on a PC with Waffle, Fidonet and UUCP email) through a dizzying sequence of email clients mandated by “corporate policy” at work and the march of software progress at home:

I went from using Eudora at work to using Apple’s PowerTalk, and from that to using WordPerfect Office (aka Groupwise), Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and finally Microsoft Outlook. Then, to further complicate matters, I went from using Eudora at home to using Apple’s PowerTalk, Claris Emailer, and Netscape Mail, back to Eudora again, and then finally Apple’s Mail.app that came with Mac OS X.

It’s all very nostalgic! No wonder he ended up with “years of archived email saved in files created by several different applications that no other application could read.”

That’s enough to convert anyone into an ardent disciple of open formats.

If you are in the same bind, Emailchemy (shareware — USD 29.50) may well be the tool for you. email, mbox, old emails, emailchemy, mail.app, apple mail. thinderbird, eudora, claris emailer, entourage, convertor, unix, the good old days

Emailchemy is an app that converts mailboxes from an astonishing number of current and not-so-current email clients into the RFC-2822 (“mbox”) format.

This helps in moving from one client to another and with retrieving emails from ancient email clients that might otherwise be lost.

Today’s update adds some improvements to the way it handles emails from Outlook Express 5 for Mac and QuickMail Pro. The folder hierarchy in both is now preserved.

It also improves the CSV export option and includes bugfixes for handling Entourage and Emailer 2 folders.

Emailchemy is shareware (USD 25) and is available from the developer’s web site .emailchemy, mailboxes, mbox, conversion, email, RFC-2822, helpful apps

Over at Spinning the Web, you can find an ingenious but complicated method for exporting Mail.app 2.0 emails into Outlook Express 6.0 using Eudora as the middle-man.

Personally, I can’t help thinking that it would easier to use EmailChemy (which is free for a “one off” use) or CosmicSoft’s emlx to mbox converter.