Freeing My Email: Import Discord And A Mozilla Outcome

Continued from ‘Freeing My Email: Open Source And Industry Standard As A Matter Of Course‘…

And eventually, I ended up with 1370 mbox files on my hard drive. Don’t be alarmed by the ’some of your Outlook data could not be converted’ status line, as it simply refers to a few bogus email signature image attachments, along with a few dozen empty folders in my Outlook organization ‘tree’:

Importing the mbox files into Apple Mail was glitch-free, as well, but the end result was underwhelming. Outlook’s multi-level folder tree structure didn’t get preserved, so underneath an ‘Import’ root folder I ended up with 1370 same-level and cryptically named folders, each containing various quantities of emails. And anyway, my ultimate aspiration was to get away from proprietary email programs (admittedly, Apple Mail is mbox-based, but I digress…) and to an open-source, multi-platform equivalent to my primary web browser, Mozilla Firefox.

So to Mozilla I went again, this time to Thunderbird. Beta 2 of version 3, with all-important Address Book interoperability on OS X, had coincidentally just been released, and the Windows version of the program has for some time now offered built-in Outlook database import capabilities. So I first ran the Windows build of Thunderbird v3 Beta 2 on my netbook to get the Outlook data imported; the folder tree structure was thankfully preserved this time. Then I copied my user profile to a USB drive and from there to the OS X version of the program installed on my MacBook. All of my email, including the all-important folder tree structure, seemingly survived this transfer two-step completely intact.

This all means, of course, that since Thunderbird runs on Linux, OS X and Windows, with a common user profile structure in all cases, my email client and archive can be operating system-independent going forward. The Lightning plug-in implements calendaring functions, and Provider syncs that calendar with Google’s online (and now offline via Gears) repository. For those of you who want to pull email folders from Thunderbird into some other mbox-cognizant program, by the way, focus your attention on the files without extensions; those are the mbox files and after you manually add the ‘.mbox’ extension they should import just fine (and if not, try a pass through Eudora Mailbox Cleaner first).

My final bit of ultimately resolved angst concerned RSS. Thunderbird (and Apple Mail, along with Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007, for that matter) include built-in RSS reader capabilities. But they pull directly from the subscriptions’ associated RSS servers, many of which have a high degree of update frequency, meaning that I can miss material unless I do a RSS refresh every few hours of every day. NewsGator’s unified server cache intermediary is therefore a valuable resource, as I’ve mentioned before, and the company does offer an OS X-based RSS reader program. But NetNewsWire operates standalone; I’ve also found an integrated email-plus-RSS client to be of great value, enabling me (for example) to accumulate a variety of research materials for upcoming writeups in a common repository.

NewsGator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker confirmed my suspicions that the company had no plans to develop an Apple Mail- or Mozilla Thunderbird-based derivative of its existing NewsGator Inbox for Outlook add-on. But Greg’s alternative suggestion will, I think, suit my particular purposes just fine:

We do have an option that may work for you, in the form of NewsGator Email edition. Basically, NewsGator Online has a POP server from which you can retrieve your content, and use rules in your mail client to organize it.

When I asked Greg if there were any notable downsides to this approach versus a traditional RSS reader, here’s how he responded:

The following differences come to mind:

• Your read states won’t sync across machines in the same way [editor note: not a problem for me, because I only access my subscription from a single client]. It’s actually exactly how a POP email server would work when using it from multiple clients; it all depends on how you set up the client to delete messages on the server (deleting a message on the server is the equivalent of "marking read" in another client). Note: if you’re just using one machine, I recommend setting it to delete messages as they’re downloaded, which is usually the default for POP clients.
• No cool menus and GUI in the mail client to help you add feeds and such [editor note: you can alternatively do subscription management functions via web browser access to the NewsGator Online portal]
• No built-in organization capability, so you have to use rules in the mail client if you want to separate into multiple folders (not an issue for you, since you use a single folder!)

Reliable access to email and RSS content (both new and archived) too important to me both professionally and personally to trust it to beta code. So for now, since Outlook 2000 is still working in a passable fashion, I’ll stick with it. But as soon as Mozilla Thunderbird v3 ‘goes gold’, I plan to make the jump. This’ll ironically bring my email client journey full-circle, in a sense, since Qualcomm has transitioned Eudora to open-source status and it’s now being managed by Mozilla as the Thunderbird-synergistic Penelope project.