Sharing mail between Windows and Linux using Mozilla
Beat Kappert
favourite POP3 mail client on Windows (no worms, no viruses, just
useful).
Now I have a W2K / Linux dual boot system and was wondering what the
best way is to share my mail folders between both operating systems.
My requirements were:
- Import of the local Netscape mbox files (the mail folders are my
archives)
- Painless sharing of the mail folders between Windows and Linux
Because it took me some hours to figure out a good solution, I thought
it would be a good idea to post my experiences here for other people
with a Windows / Linux dual boot system.
I looked at different mail clients from Eudora to Pine, including some
Java programs. They all either cannot import my existing Netscape mail
folders, are not available for both operating systems or use different
formats on Windows and Linux.
My Netscape version (4.78) was not able to share mail folders easily
between Windows and Linux. The extensions of the summary files differ,
but even after removing them I still couldn't open the Windows mbox
files under Linux (it worked with Pine however). Some people have
posted success with such a configuration, but because I switch a lot
between Windows and Linux, I wanted something straight-forward and
didn't have the ambition to debug the Netscape option.
Indeed, with Mozilla (0.9.3) I found a very simple and clean solution
that seems to work well:
I have three partitions with filesystems:
1) NTFS with W2K (read-only in Linux)
2) FAT32 for data (read/write on both operating systems)
I refer to this as F:\MOZILLA_SHARED on Windows
and as /data/MOZILLA_SHARED on Linux
3) ext2 for Linux (invisible to Windows :-)
Here are the basic steps it took to set up the configuration. They are
not extremely detailed, because you often may want to do it your own
way. Automatic procedures probably will interfere (importing of
profiles and mail from Netscape) and you have to stop and start
Mozilla for certain actions. But the following should suffice as a
general guideline.
1) Install Mozilla on Windows (good feeling, isn't it?).
2) Create a profile but do not use the default location. Instead use
F:\MOZILLA_SHARED as the profile location. This is required if you
want to share bookmarks with Linux like I do it or if you want to
leave your mail folders in the default location.
3) Import the Netscape bookmarks. Copying the bookmarks file may be
good enough, but because I had problems editing bookmarks on Windows,
I hoped to correct the format of the bookmarks in that way (not sure
if it changed anything).
4) It may be that your mail gets imported from Netscape during
installation. But here is the way to do it manually:
- Create a mail account
- Select that account in Mozillas mail program and choose "View
settings for this account" on the right side. Under "Server Settings"
you find "Local directory". This is where your mail is actually
stored. Define this to be a directory of your choice on the shared
partition, like F:\MOZILLA_SHARED\MAIL_SHARED.
You may also leave the mail in the default directory, somewhere under
F:\MOZILLA_SHARED\<yourprofile>. I just moved it a level up so I won't
accidentally remove it when I delete the profile on Windows.
5) When you have created the mail account, copy over the Netscape mail
files to the directory F:\MOZILLA_SHARED\MAIL_SHARED. Remove
everything that has an extension .summary or .snm. Mozilla will create
its own index files with the extension .msf.
Keep directories with an .sbd extension that contain files. For some
unknown reason I had empty *.sbd directories. I removed them and it
didn't seem to matter.
I am not sure if the format of popstate.dat is identical for Netscape
and Mozilla. In my case the file was empty anyway (only comments), so
it didn't matter.
6) I couldn't find a way to get rid of "Local Folders", just ignore
them.
7) Boot Linux and feel the joy connected with this action.
8) Install Mozilla and create a profile. The profile data remains in
the default location ~/.mozilla.
9) Create a mail account and like under Windows set the "local
directory" to the shared mail folder on the common Winodws/Linux
partition. In my case this is /data/MOZILLA_SHARED/MAIL_SHARED
(F:\MOZILLA_SHARED\MAIL_SHARED).
10) Find bookmarks.html in ~/.mozilla and rename or delete it. Then
create a symbolic link to the bookmarks of the Windows profile:
ln -s /data/MOZILLA_SHARED/<whatever>/bookmarks.html
~/.mozilla/bookmarks.html
Like this you can share the same bookmarks file on Windows and Linux.
Works fine for me.
Although Mozilla 0.9.3 still has a few bugs, I am generally impressed
with how for this open source project got. Both, the browser and the
mail client are very useful already. My congratulations to this team!
Beat Kappert