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

Tags: apple mail. thinderbird, Claris Emailer, convertor, email, Emailchemy, entourage, Eudora, mail.app, mbox, old emails, the good old days, unix

The Copy Chief at Wired News Tony Long has written an acidic attack on the role of technology in the decline of writing standards.

It is technology — IM, text messaging and email — which he argues is (mostly) to blame:

“it doesn’t matter whether you are reading your local rag, surfing the net or trying to make heads or tails of someone’s inane blog — the quality bar is set lower than ever.”

Whether or not you find his argument persuasive, you will enjoy the verbal imagery.

It runs the whole gamut from poetic (“[Email's] speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.”) to the more direct (“… it’s not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It’s important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well…. It’s important to think before you write.”)

I want to believe him. Goodness knows there’s some barely legible stuff out there. But are things really more badder?

I couldn’t shake a niggle from the back of my mind. Then I remembered what it was:

…Two evils, Ignorance and Want of Taste, have produced a Third; I mean the continual Corruption of our English tongue, which, without some timely Remedy, will suffer more by the false Refinements of Twenty Years past than it hath been improved in the foregoing Hundred.

— Jonathan Swift, “The Continual Corruption of our English Tongue”, The Tatler, 1710.text, email, IM, standards, punctuation, grammar, the good old days, language, technology, Jonathan Swift

Tags: email, grammar, IM, Jonathan Swift, language, punctuation, standards, technology, text, the good old days