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.

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Apple Matters has produced a walk-through on switching from Mail.app to Thunderbird using the emlx to mbox converter from CosmicSoft.

It covers all the steps from finding your Mail.app messages, converting, moving and importing them again and features some screenshots to help you on your way.

Perhaps the emlx to mbox converter has got smarter or perhaps the author was lucky, but he doesn’t mention any of the problems encountered by another user trying to do the same thing, which were posted on macOSXHints some time ago.

Needless to say, moving back the other way again from Thunderbird to Mail 2.0 will be easier and the outcome more pleasurable.

Related posts

• Switching from Thunderbird to Apple Mail
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• Full Marks for Eudora Mailbox Cleaner

Emailchemy is an amazing utility that can convert mailboxes from a vast array of email clients (ranging from most currently in use to others long forgotten) into any one of the following formats:

RFC-2822 mailboxes (”mbox” format or “UNIX-style”) and variants, folders of individual RFC-2822 email files (.txt or .eml files), Comma-separated value files (.csv files), Maildir (qmail) and Maildir++ (Courier IMAP).

A new updated version (1.8) adds a “toolbox” option to the app’s main screen:

The new utilities offer useful extra additional conversion grunt:

1. IMAP ImportServer - import your converted mail into your new email software using this desktop mail server.
2. Mailbox Splitter - split large mbox files by message count or file size
3. Address Harvester - extract email addresses from almost any file
4. Mac OS X Mail Cleaner - clean out files leftover from the Tiger upgrade

Emailchemy is shareware (USD 28 for a single user) and is available from the developer’s web site .

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• Emailchemy 1.7.2: Amazing mailbox converter adds yet another format
• Emailchemy: Converting or Recovering old emails
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• Python script to backup an IMAP Account

In the hunt for a solid, comprehensive backup solution for his IMAP accounts, Rui Carmo (Tao of Mac) has produced a python script that will copy all the emails from an IMAP account, do it all as safely as possible and generate mbox-formatted files that can be imported into Mail.app and is completely and utterly free.

You can’t ask for more than that!

Not being very smart about these things, I asked him why he didn’t just copy Mail.app’s local caches. He set me straight:

Well, the caches aren’t portable, aren’t in a standardized format, are not guaranteed to be complete (remember the Preferences: you may or may not cache messages, and even then you’re only sure of those you actually downloaded), and they don’t necessarily store the original message contents as they arrived to your server.

Not only that, doing it this way makes the backup useful for people whatever mail client they use.

He hopes to wrap the whole thing in a shiny GUI soon, but for the moment it’s command-line only.

Rui is looking for feedback and testers to help improve the script even more. You can get the script and leave your helpful comments on his web site .

[Thanks to Jacob Rus for the "aquafied" Python image. Check out more nice Mac-friendly icons from Python's future at his web site ]

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Last Week macOSXHints ran a tip about using Mail.app’s “Save As…” option to export messages in mbox format.

Mark Pilgrim, who recently switched from OS X to Linux, takes the opportunity to point out that this option doesn’t create a valid mbox. Rather, it is another example of Apple’s wicked addiction to proprietary file formats.

Mail.app was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Mark. It made him switch away. And the pain is still raw:

However, in the interests of fairness, I will amend my previous statement that Mail.app is a roach motel that auto-upgraded 14 years of my mail into a proprietary, undocumented format with no possibility of exporting it to an open format. This is not true. Mail.app is a roach motel that auto-upgraded 14 years of my mail into a proprietary, undocumented format with a tantalizingly broken export feature. I apologize for the confusion.

Mail.app. Gone but not easily forgotten.

Fortunately developers have found solutions and work-arounds for exporting Mail 2.0 messages. Mark could use either emlx to mbox converter or, better, the Archive script in Andreas Amann’s excellent Mail Scripts to solve his problem.

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John Gruber and Mark Pilgrim are having a very public and very excellent conversation about Apple and file formats, proprietary and open.

Mark Pilgrim announced that he was switching from OS X to Ubuntu, citing the ever-advancing proprietary creep in Apple as the main reason for his switch. Apple “just doesn’t get it” when it comes to open file formats.

Uproar. Not least because of Pilgrim’s reputation as a long-standing Mac guru.

John Gruber responded to the post, arguing that “Apple gets it / Apple doesn’t get it” is too crude a view:

The question isn’t “Does Apple get it?”, but “Does Apple get it enough?” …. [W]hile it is easy to find ways to complain that Apple is not open enough — under-documented and undocumented security updates and system revisions, under-documented and undocumented file formats — it would be hard to argue with the premise that Apple today is more open than it has ever been before. (Exhibit A: the Web Kit project.)

But there are things that could be better, should be better, but aren’t, and it’s hard to ascribe these policies to anything other than management that is, at best, indifferent to issues related to openness.

Interesting as this all is (and there is a lot more of it—you should read the posts on both sites), I am posting this because it turns out that Mail.app played a crucial role in Pilgrim’s decision to switch.

In his response to John’s response, Mark writes that Mail 2.0 finally forced his decision to switch:

And then came Tiger, and Mail.app 2.0. In Mac OS X 10.4, Apple deliberately changed Mail.app to use their proprietary .emlx data format, apparently to work around the limitations of Spotlight. Mail.app 2.0 helpfully auto-converted all my wonderful mbox files into Apple’s shitty undocumented format. I’m now in the process of undoing the damage….

This was really the last straw for me. I was already feeling vaguely dissatisfied with Apple; now I feel actively betrayed. By the time I even realized what had happened (a year after buying OS X 10.4), it was too late. Now I’m forced to migrate all my mail yet again from yet another proprietary format, and the best documentation I’ve found so far is on LiveJournal. Jesus H. Christ, somebody deserves to be fired for that.

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