Migrating from Eudora 7.1.0.9 to Eudora OSE - mail folder problem

[bill....@gmail.com]

I've been running Eudora 7.1.0.9 on Windows 7 64-bit systems for a couple of years now.

It took me a while to work out that it worked better if I installed it at
C:\Users\me\AppData\Roaming\Qualcomm\Eudora
but once I'd worked that out it worked fine.

Sadly, I've had to change my information provider, and Eudora couldn't pick up e-mail from the new information provider.

I tried installing Thunderbird, but it wouldn't import my mail folders (which are big and complicated) even after I'd cleaned them up with Eudora Rescue. Eudora 7.1.0.9 reads the cleaned up files happily. The originals are saved elsewhere, and the cleaned up files now reside in the original Eudora file space.

Eudora OSE worked a whole lot better than Thunderbird, and appears to have imported all the cleaned up files from Eudora, and does pick up e-mails from my new information provider.

The mail files created by Eudora OSE seem to work fine.

What Eudora OSE won't do is access the content of the imported folders, which I've left in the original Eudora directory, but set up Eudora OSE to access as "Local Files".

Eudora OSE can see the whole old directory tree - my mail folders are mostly split between six folders (bookings.fol, business.fol, friends.fol etc) but while Eudora OSE can see the individual mail files within these sub-directories, it doesn't open them.

It appears to be trying to open them with a rotating activity indicator spinning away, but nothing happens.

There really are mail messages in the individual mail files. I can open them and read them with Mozilla Firefox, though there's a lot more text visible than the mail itself.

Can anybody suggest what might be going on, and how I might fix it?

I've also got another issue - Eudora 7.1.0.9 used POP to collect my mail from my original provider, and Eudora OSE uses POP to collect mail from them in exactly the same way, which works fine, but it's using IMAP to pick up e-mail from my new provider.

I'd like to switch it to POP, but if there's a mechanism to do this within Eudora OSE, I've yet to find it. It ought to be trivial ...

I've done some browsing in the hope of finding a decent tutorial or relevant discussion, but nothing has shown up yet.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[Ajo Wissink]

On Mon, 18 Nov 2013 03:52:55 -0800 (PST), bill....@gmail.com wrote:

>Sadly, I've had to change my information provider, and Eudora couldn't pick up e-mail from the new information provider.

You are probably the only person on earth who is unable to pick up
email with Eudora.

Would you please give some details on your statement? What is the
name of your new ISP? What settings did you use? What error messages
did you get? etc...

[bill....@gmail.com]

Ask the right question ...

It turns out that when my old ISP asked Eudora for my user-name they wanted my real user-name on their system. The new ISP wanted the e-mail address for the e-mail I wanted to pick up, not the user-name that lets me mess with the rest of the web-site - they didn't know enough about Eudora to wake up to this.

I don't quite know what prompted me to make that particular change either.

So I've been wasting my time for a month, and can stick with Eudora 7.1.0.9 after all.

So, thanks very much for the help! You've rescued me from a very irritating situation.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[John H Meyers]

On 11/18/2013 5:52 AM:

> I've had to change my information provider,
> and Eudora couldn't pick up e-mail from the new information provider.

As an isolated statement, this would suggest only
that you failed to follow your [unnamed] provider's instructions properly,
or else do not know how to handle some kind of error, the lack of your
specifying which precludes our being able to help you.

> I tried installing Thunderbird, but it wouldn't import my mail folders.
> Eudora OSE [imported] a whole lot better than Thunderbird,
> and appears to have imported all the cleaned up files from Eudora.

We know that Qualcomm improved Thunderbird's
importer in OSE (which is only a special version of Thunderbird 3.0.4),
but Mozilla's developers did not keep that improvement for any
later versions of Thunderbird, which makes OSE the likely best importer
for Eudora mail, with the understanding that "import" means a special
operation in OSE which reads original mail from where Eudora stores mail
and in the end writes all new mail, in a new format, to where Thunderbird
stores mail, there being no overlap between these completely separate areas.

After any import of mail, however, the OSE version of Thunderbird
is so buggy, insecure and obsolete that it is considered better
to update to the latest version of Thunderbird.

> What Eudora OSE won't do is access the content of the imported folders,
> which I've left in the original Eudora directory,
> but set up Eudora OSE to access as "Local Files"

Sorry, but if you mean that you expect OSE (or Thunderbird)
to work directly with old Eudora mailboxes, each program's way
of storing mail is incompatible with the other -- that's why there's
an "import" function. It is true, however, that the output of the
OSE Eudora mailbox importer does go to the "Local Folders" account in TB/OSE.

> There really are mail messages in the individual mail files.
> I can open them and read them with Mozilla Firefox,
> though there's a lot more text visible than the mail itself.

It's a bit unusual but surely creative
to try to open email mailboxes using a web browser.
Did that sound like a way to read some of the mail
containing HTML? Unfortunately, this generally doesn't
work well for a concatenation of independent email messages,
nor even for one single email message containing multiple
parts and attachments.

> Can anybody suggest what might be going on, and how I might fix it?

Summary thus far:
Someone is doing something wrong and it somehow or other doesn't work :)

> I've also got another issue - Eudora 7.1.0.9 used POP
> to collect my mail from my original provider,
> and Eudora OSE uses POP to collect mail from them
> in exactly the same way, which works fine,
> but it's using IMAP to pick up e-mail from my new provider.

Does this mean that you can, after all, use your new provider,
even though you at first said otherwise, or are you merely
attempting to connect via IMAP to a POP server, and thus failing?

> I'd like to switch it to POP,
> but if there's a mechanism to do this within Eudora OSE,
> I've yet to find it. It ought to be trivial.

Unlike classic Eudora, TB/OSE does not allow account types
to be switched between POP vs. IMAP, and it is not trivial
to do so, because all POP mailboxes are local (in your computer),
while all IMAP mailboxes reside instead on the remote server,
so that switching involves completely forgetting about
(or re-creating) one of these entire (and different)
sets of mailboxes.

The architecture of classic (original) Eudora uses only
a common set of local mailboxes which never changes,
whereas TB/OSE commonly has even a completely different set
of local mailboxes per account, plus a different way of
storing settings, all of which mitigate against
any easy "switching" that you may have expected
only because of your experience with classic Eudora.

> I've done some browsing in the hope of finding a decent tutorial
> or relevant discussion, but nothing has shown up yet.

How's this discussion going? Decent? Relevant?

--

[John H Meyers]

On 11/18/2013 8:19 PM:

> It turns out that when my old ISP asked Eudora for my user-name
> they wanted my real user-name on their system.

Neither ISPs nor their servers "ask Eudora" for your user name.

> The new ISP wanted the e-mail address for the e-mail I wanted to pick up,
> not the user-name that lets me mess with the rest of the web-site -
> they didn't know enough about Eudora to wake up to this.

Would it surprise you to learn that the ISP's servers
have no way at all to know or care what program or software
is trying to fetch email for you, so they can not discriminate
in any way between Eudora, Outlook, Thunderbird,
or someone typing commands via a keyboard using a "telnet" client?

They don't need to know anything about you -- you, on the other hand,
have to know what they require you to use for a "user name,"
which, along with a password, is required to be presented
identically, by anyone, via any client, to gain access to any account.

Whenever any ISP has servers that handle accounts for multiple
different domains, e.g. us...@example.net and us...@otherplaces.com,
they typically require the full email address to be specified
as a "user name," because there may well be some mailbox
named "Bill" at every independent domain, so they have to
narrow it down further to know which "Bill" you are.

Some of these combined operations of different domains
on the same servers occur because of mergers, some
because of ISPs who have always had multiple domain names,
some because smaller operators may find it cheaper
to pay bigger operators to handle their email, etc.

> So I've been wasting my time for a month,
> and can stick with Eudora 7.1.0.9 after all.

Miraculous!

> So, thanks very much for the help!

> You've [Ajo] rescued me from a very irritating situation.

The USA has always needed Canada to protect it,
and they seem to do everything at less expense, too :)

--

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Thursday, 21 November 2013 07:02:57 UTC+11, John H Meyers wrote:
> On 11/18/2013 8:19 PM:
> > It turns out that when my old ISP asked Eudora for my user-name
> > they wanted my real user-name on their system.
>
> Neither ISPs nor their servers "ask Eudora" for your user name.

It's one of the bits of information that Eudora 7.1.0.9 asks for under "Tools/Options/Getting started".

> > The new ISP wanted the e-mail address for the e-mail I wanted to pick up, not the user-name that lets me mess with the rest of the web-site - they didn't know enough about Eudora to wake up to this.
>
> Would it surprise you to learn that the ISP's servers have no way at all to know or care what program or software is trying to fetch email for you, so they can not discriminate in any way between Eudora, Outlook, Thunderbird, or someone typing commands via a keyboard using a "telnet" client?

Not at all. They do - however - give advice to people who are having trouble picking up their e-mail, and that advice is tailored to match the software the client is using.

> They don't need to know anything about you -- you, on the other hand, have to know what they require you to use for a "user name," which, along with a password, is required to be presented identically, by anyone, via any client, to gain access to any account.

Right. I've been using computers since 1963 and was programming a PDP-8 in Macro-8 assembly language in 1967. I can see the point in reminding me of the fundamentals, but I thought I'd posted enough detail to make it clear that I wasn't a total newbie.

> Whenever any ISP has servers that handle accounts for multiple different domains, e.g. us...@example.net and us...@otherplaces.com, they typically require the full email address to be specified as a "user name," because there may well be some mailbox named "Bill" at every independent domain, so they have to narrow it down further to know which "Bill" you are.

The problem here was that my previous ISP (KPN in the Netherlands) insisted that the "user name" was different from my widely published e-mail address, which does strike me as perfectly sensible, if perhaps a little counter-intuitive.

> Some of these combined operations of different domains on the same servers occur because of mergers, some because of ISPs who have always had multiple domain names, some because smaller operators may find it cheaper to pay bigger operators to handle their email, etc.

> > So I've been wasting my time for a month, and can stick with Eudora 7.1.0.9 after all.

> Miraculous!

Scarcely. But a very real relief.

>
> > So, thanks very much for the help!
>
> > You've [Ajo] rescued me from a very irritating situation.
>
> The USA has always needed Canada to protect it, and they seem to do everything at less expense, too :)

Don't get me started. My new ISP is in Australia. I'm not going to risk upsetting them by identifying them. They have been helpful and responsive but clearly I'm in that inconvenient catagory between the full-fledged geek and complete newbie.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Thursday, 21 November 2013 05:33:04 UTC+11, John H Meyers wrote:
> On 11/18/2013 5:52 AM:
> >
> > I've had to change my information provider, and Eudora couldn't pick up e-mail from the new information provider.
>
> As an isolated statement, this would suggest only that you failed to follow your [unnamed] provider's instructions properly, or else do not know how to handle some kind of error, the lack of your specifying which precludes our being able to help you.

Correct. You now know exactly what went wrong. How much data would I have had to supply to allow you to diagnose that particular problem?

> > I tried installing Thunderbird, but it wouldn't import my mail folders. Eudora OSE [imported] a whole lot better than Thunderbird, and appears to have imported all the cleaned up files from Eudora.
>
> We know that Qualcomm improved Thunderbird's importer in OSE (which is only a special version of Thunderbird 3.0.4), but Mozilla's developers did not keep that improvement for any later versions of Thunderbird, which makes OSE the likely best importer for Eudora mail, with the understanding that "import" means a special operation in OSE which reads original mail from where Eudora stores mail and in the end writes all new mail, in a new format, to where Thunderbird stores mail, there being no overlap between these completely separate areas.

> After any import of mail, however, the OSE version of Thunderbird
is so buggy, insecure and obsolete that it is considered better to update to the latest version of Thunderbird.

> > What Eudora OSE won't do is access the content of the imported folders, which I've left in the original Eudora directory, but set up Eudora OSE to access as "Local Files"
>
> Sorry, but if you mean that you expect OSE (or Thunderbird)
to work directly with old Eudora mailboxes, each program's way
of storing mail is incompatible with the other -- that's why there's
an "import" function. It is true, however, that the output of the OSE Eudora mailbox importer does go to the "Local Folders" account in TB/OSE.

I did mention that I'd run the original Eudora mail files through Eudora Rescue, which does rewrite the Eudora files into a more or less industry standard format - as I mentioned, the rewritten files were more or less intelligible when read with Mozilla Firefox.

> > There really are mail messages in the individual mail files. I can open them and read them with Mozilla Firefox, though there's a lot more text visible than the mail itself.
>
> It's a bit unusual but surely creative to try to open email mailboxes using a web browser. Did that sound like a way to read some of the mail containing HTML? Unfortunately, this generally doesn't work well for a concatenation of independent email messages, nor even for one single email message containing multiple parts and attachments.

I was using it as a diagnostic tool - no more. It did make it fairly clear what Eudora Rescue was actually doing - which was pretty much what the Eudora Rescue release notes claimed.

> > Can anybody suggest what might be going on, and how I might fix it?
>
> Summary thus far:
>
> Someone is doing something wrong and it somehow or other doesn't work :)

Complete as far as it goes, but less than useful.

Hints about why Eudora OSE won't read the imported files might be helpful. I've looked at the permissions in a superficial way- they aren't read-only any more, but that doesn't explain why Eudora OSE won't even read them. I'll have to click on an "Advanced" tag or two, which tends to open cans of worms.

> > I've also got another issue - Eudora 7.1.0.9 used POP to collect my mail from my original provider, and Eudora OSE uses POP to collect mail from them in exactly the same way, which works fine, but it's using IMAP to pick up e-mail from my new provider.
>

> Does this mean that you can, after all, use your new provider,even though you at first said otherwise, or are you merely attempting to connect via IMAP to a POP server, and thus failing?

I'm now picking up mail with both programs, but Eudora OSE won't let me append new messages to even the cleaned up version of my old Eudora mail folders.

> > I'd like to switch it to POP, but if there's a mechanism to do this within Eudora OSE, I've yet to find it. It ought to be trivial.

> Unlike classic Eudora, TB/OSE does not allow account types to be switched between POP vs. IMAP, and it is not trivial to do so, because all POP mailboxes are local (in your computer), while all IMAP mailboxes reside instead on the remote server,so that switching involves completely forgetting about (or re-creating) one of these entire (and different) sets of mailboxes.

> The architecture of classic (original) Eudora uses only a common set of local mailboxes which never changes, whereas TB/OSE commonly has even a completely different set of local mailboxes per account, plus a different way of storing settings, all of which mitigate against any easy "switching" that you may have expected only because of your experience with classic Eudora.
>
> > I've done some browsing in the hope of finding a decent tutorial or relevant discussion, but nothing has shown up yet.
>
> How's this discussion going? Decent? Relevant?

The points about Eudora OSE's particular rigidities are interesting and potentially useful. Today's job is getting on with telling a few hundred contacts that I've got a new e-mail address, which I'm doing one at time, since I've not contacted a few of them for a few years now and need to throw in personalised sweeteners.

Once I've got that task sorted, I'll have another crack at Eudora OSE's perverse rigidities, with the long term aim of migrating to Thunderbird - being stuck with a non-maintained version of Thunderbird in Eudora OSE isn't attractive.

My problem is that Ive got 1l,030 files in my e-mail history - some 1.5 Gigabytes worth - and I'd like be able to access the lot from my actually e-mail program. Duplicating just the active parts of that structure in a new e-mail reader would take a lot of work,which I'd prefer to avoid, and it would make checking the history a two stage process, which is again something that I'd prefer to avoid.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[John H Meyers]

On 11/20/2013 6:19 PM:

> It's one of the bits of information that Eudora 7.1.0.9 asks for under "Tools/Options/Getting started".

This does not mean that ISP _servers_ ask clients for anything;
POP3 is a completely "passive" protocol, in that the server
simply waits for commands from the client side,
and carries out each command as received.

SMTP is much the same.

The only slight exception is when the client command
is to start an authentication dialog of a type which
causes the server to respond with two questions,
but the client already knows exactly what those will be,
so, in effect, those server responses are still
just ordinary responses to each client command or input.

> ISPs do - however - give advice to people who are having trouble picking up their e-mail,

> and that advice is tailored to match the software the client is using.

The only "tailoring" is by way of illustrating _where_ the user name,
for example, is found in the client-side settings interface,
but as to _what_ username to use, it has to be identical for all clients.

> I thought I'd posted enough detail to make it clear that I wasn't a total newbie.

Yes, but many other readers are newbies, so I try to make sure that anything posted
does not give them any false impressions. I know you have the right idea
in your own mind, but sometimes what is posted
could convey the wrong idea to other readers,
and I apparently obsess on trying to make everything
misinterpretation-proof (which still never succeeds :)

--

[John H Meyers]

On 11/20/2013 6:52 PM:

> I did mention that I'd run the original Eudora mail files through Eudora Rescue,

> which does rewrite the Eudora files into a more or less industry standard format.

Yes, you mentioned that, and I failed refresh my own memory about what
Eudora Rescue does, assuming that it was only a "mailbox cleaner"
for Eudora (like a certain similar sounding Mac OS product),
which a new glance shows that it isn't.

> What Eudora OSE won't do is access the content of the imported folders,
> which I've left in the original Eudora directory

I think that this is where things may have gone wrong,
but I'm not absolutely clear on what you mean.

What, for example, did you mean by "imported folders"
in that last sentence quoted above?

If you meant the output of Eudora Rescue,
if that program writes its output over the original
Eudora mailbox files (does it?) I'm not sure what impact
that might have on original Eudora, but the way
in which Eudora Rescue apparently should be used,
when importing from Eudora to Thunderbird,
is detailed in this Thunderbird-side article:

Importing from Eudora - Thunderbird
Importing Eudora Mail with Eudora Rescue
<http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_from_Eudora_(Thunderbird)#Importing_Eudora_Mail_with_Eudora_Rescue>
Quoting the instructions:
After you have used Eudora Rescue, you can import the mbox into Thunderbird
using the ImportExportTools extension [not the built-in importer]

So, if instead you used the built-in importer on the output of
Eudora Rescue, I don't know what would happen.

Perhaps some mailboxes processed by Eudora Rescue can be simply
dropped into where the TB/OSE mailboxes are stored,
but I don't know, and leave it to experiment to find out
(there may even be some directions which come with Eudora Rescue,
but naturally I have no motivation to look for or read them myself :)

If by "Imported folders," above, you meant the results of the OSE importer,
the results are suitable only for TB/OSE, not for any further use by Eudora,
so those results should not be moved back to the original Eudora "user data" folder.

That's all I can fathom from the expressions that were posted.

Have you ever seen images on web pages that at first appear rather
crude and fuzzy, requiring several re-drawings in ever increasing detail,
until finally the image is clear? If one posts too little in detail
or specifics, the idea conveyed may remain fuzzy, and it may take
a number of iterations before readers can get enough detail
to understand what you are doing, or even trying to do,
so I think it pays to invest up front, and not wait
to be asked for ever more clarification,
which requires extra work on both sides.

Eudora Rescue home page (for onlookers):
<http://qwerky.50webs.com/eudorarescue/>

--

[John H Meyers]

On 11/23/2013 3:00 AM, John H Meyers wrote:

> There may even be some instructions which come with Eudora Rescue

Such as these:
<http://qwerky.50webs.com/eudorarescue/readme.htm#using>

OP:

>> What Eudora OSE won't do is access the content of the imported folders,

>> which I've left in the original Eudora directory.

If "imported folders" means the output of Eudora Rescue,
and if "original Eudora directory" means where the input to Eudora Rescue
came from, that would seem to be incorrect usage of Eudora Rescue,
whose output is not intended to be usable at all by original Eudora,
but is intended to be usable directly by Thunderbird
(and/or by its "ImportExportTools" extension, since the file extensions
and directory structure of Eudora Rescue's output are still not suitable
for a general mail directory tree in Thunderbird),
if various options of Eudora Rescue are properly chosen.

If those phrases were used to mean something else,
too many combinations seem possible to keep guessing at,
and a re-examination of the instructions and/or
posting of more (and clearer) detail by the OP
would seem to be called for.

I hope that the little bit of research done for you here
helps you take it from this point and complete your project.

--

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Saturday, 23 November 2013 19:12:09 UTC+11, John H Meyers wrote:
> On 11/20/2013 6:19 PM:
> >
> > It's one of the bits of information that Eudora 7.1.0.9 asks for under "Tools/Options/Getting started".

<snip>

> > I thought I'd posted enough detail to make it clear that I wasn't a total newbie.
>
> Yes, but many other readers are newbies, so I try to make sure that anything posted does not give them any false impressions. I know you have the right idea
in your own mind, but sometimes what is posted could convey the wrong idea to other readers, and I apparently obsess on trying to make everything misinterpretation-proof (which still never succeeds :)

I can sympathise with that. Getting the right level of technical discussion is always difficult.

Put in too little detail, and nobody can follow you. Put in too much, and you bore most readers. Put the extra detail in the wrong place, and you've wasted your own time and everybody elses'.

There's a lot to be said for dialogue.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Saturday, 23 November 2013 23:23:15 UTC+11, John H Meyers wrote:
> On 11/23/2013 3:00 AM, John H Meyers wrote:
> >
> > There may even be some instructions which come with Eudora Rescue
>
> Such as these:
>
> <http://qwerky.50webs.com/eudorarescue/readme.htm#using>
>
> OP:
>
> >> What Eudora OSE won't do is access the content of the imported folders

> >> which I've left in the original Eudora directory.
>
> If "imported folders" means the output of Eudora Rescue, and if "original Eudora directory" means where the input to Eudora Rescue came from, that would seem to be incorrect usage of Eudora Rescue, whose output is not intended to be usable at all by original Eudora,

It seems to work, none-the-less. The Eudora Rescue release notes seem to me to be saying that Eudora leaves stuff out that other e-mail programs want, and Eudora Rescue creates the necessary extra content, which Eudora seems happy to ignore.

> but is intended to be usable directly by Thunderbird (and/or by its "ImportExportTools" extension, since the file extensions

and directory structure of Eudora Rescue's output are still not suitable for a general mail directory tree in Thunderbird),if various options of Eudora Rescue are properly chosen.

I explicitly provided the input and output directories, added the -x=.mbx option, as recommended, and the -ft option to get the Thunderbird format message delimiter.
Everything else was left at the default values.

> If those phrases were used to mean something else, too many combinations seem possible to keep guessing at, and a re-examination of the instructions and/or posting of more (and clearer) detail by the OP would seem to be called for.

Well, you've called for it. I seem to have managed the "more". Whether it's clearer won't be obvious until there have been a few reactions.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Saturday, 23 November 2013 20:00:09 UTC+11, John H Meyers wrote:
> On 11/20/2013 6:52 PM:
> >
> > I did mention that I'd run the original Eudora mail files through Eudora Rescue, which does rewrite the Eudora files into a more or less industry standard format.
>
> Yes, you mentioned that, and I failed refresh my own memory about what Eudora Rescue does, assuming that it was only a "mailbox cleaner" for Eudora (like a certain similar sounding Mac OS product), which a new glance shows that it isn't.
>

> > What Eudora OSE won't do is access the content of the imported folders, which I've left in the original Eudora directory.

>
> I think that this is where things may have gone wrong,
but I'm not absolutely clear on what you mean.
>
> What, for example, did you mean by "imported folders" in that last sentence quoted above?

I'd set Eudora OSE to import my e-mail files from Eudora, which it certainly seemed to do, though it took it's time doing it.

> If you meant the output of Eudora Rescue, if that program writes its output over the original Eudora mailbox files (does it?).

Eudora Rescue asks for an input file address and an output file address. I'd backed up the original files (on my hard disk), and got Eudora Rescue to read the backed-up files, and write out the rescued files to a third location. I then over-wrote the original Eudora files with the rescued versions - which didn't worry Eudora too much, and let Eudora OSE work out for itself which set of Eudora files it was going to import.

> I'm not sure what impact that might have on original Eudora, but the way
in which Eudora Rescue apparently should be used, when importing from Eudora to Thunderbird, is detailed in this Thunderbird-side article:
>
> Importing from Eudora - Thunderbird
> Importing Eudora Mail with Eudora Rescue
> <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_from_Eudora_(Thunderbird)#Importing_Eudora_Mail_with_Eudora_Rescue>
> Quoting the instructions:
>
> After you have used Eudora Rescue, you can import the mbox into Thunderbird using the ImportExportTools extension [not the built-in importer]
>
> So, if instead you used the built-in importer on the output of Eudora Rescue, I don't know what would happen.

I do. Nothing. Thunderbird hung up.

> Perhaps some mailboxes processed by Eudora Rescue can be simply

dropped into where the TB/OSE mailboxes are stored, but I don't know, and leave it to experiment to find out (there may even be some directions which come with Eudora Rescue,but naturally I have no motivation to look for or read them myself :).

Eudora Rescue is a rather old program. The revision history stops at 2005/04/05, if the release notes are to be trsusted. The release notes do include an explicit reference to Thunderbird 1.O.

>
> If by "Imported folders," above, you meant the results of the OSE importer, the results are suitable only for TB/OSE, not for any further use by Eudora,
so those results should not be moved back to the original Eudora "user data" folder.

The "imported folders" I was referring to were the archived e-mails, which Eudora OSE could see - at the folder level, but not at the sub-folder level. I'd had a folder in a folder, and OSE could see everything except the sub-folder.

When I yanked the sub-folder out of the original folder and wrote it into the file as a separate folder, Eudora OSE could then see it and its contents.

While Eudora OSE could see the individual files within the folders, it couldn't open them to let me read the individual e-mails within each file.

>
> That's all I can fathom from the expressions that were posted.
>
> Have you ever seen images on web pages that at first appear rather crude and fuzzy, requiring several re-drawings in ever increasing detail, until finally the image is clear? If one posts too little in detail or specifics, the idea conveyed may remain fuzzy, and it may take a number of iterations before readers can get enough detail to understand what you are doing, or even trying to do, so I think it pays to invest up front, and not wait to be asked for ever more clarification, which requires extra work on both sides.
>
> Eudora Rescue home page (for onlookers):
>
> <http://qwerky.50webs.com/eudorarescue/>

There's obviously a balance between posting every fine detail, and not posting enough to give anybody a clue what's going on. A few iterations tend to focus the attention wonderfully.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[John H Meyers]

On 11/25/2013 7:27 AM:

[when running Eudora Rescue]
> I added the -x=.mbx option, as recommended

There was no "recommendation" -- everything depends upon
the specific intended purpose, including for what system
the output is intended.

For output intended to be used by Thunderbird,
this is not fatal but is wrong, because TB
does not expect ".mbx" extensions, so it will
use the entire output file name as mailbox name,
whereas Eudora necessarily appended required extensions .mbx and .toc
to mailbox names to yield its required internal file names for disk storage.

You have, in effect, treated Eudora Rescue as if it were a "mailbox cleaner"
for Eudora (just as I was first imagining upon reading your first post),
whereas it is instead actually a complete _exporter_
whose output is meant to be used by a _different email system_

> and the -ft option to get the Thunderbird format message delimiter.

So you replaced Eudora's original mailboxes (whose message delimiters
include "???@???") with the converted output of Eudora Rescue,
intended only for Thunderbird, whose message delimiters
have now, per your option, replaced every "???@???" with "-" ?

Eudora mailboxes also each consist of _two_ files each (one .mbx + one .toc),
and Eudora Rescue appears to use _both_ of those as input,
producing only _one_ output file for use by Unix or Thunderbird, etc.,
which then leaves Eudora's original ".toc" file an "orphan"

And then you wonder why TB/OSE's importer from _Eudora's original mailboxes_
may not have recognized anything in the thus mangled Eudora mailboxes
that you left in place of the originals?

This discussion has centered around the existence of two
_mutually exclusive_ paths to importing from original Eudora mailboxes,
one of which is that you might use _only_ the TB/OSE importer
to do the entire job, taking Eudora's _original_ mailboxes as input,
vs. the mutually exclusive path of using _only_ Eudora Rescue,
which can be considered a complete importer (or exporter) in itself
(or possibly together with TB's "Import/Export Tools" extension).

Note also that _neither_ of those paths was ever supposed to modify
Eudora's original mailboxes -- original Eudora should have been
left untouched in any way by either one of the
mutually exclusive proper strategies of importing.

But you've come along and violated every aspect of what's supposed to be done;
you've clobbered Eudora's original mailboxes by overwriting them with
E.R.'s output, where E.R. is by itself basically a complete exporter,
whose output is meant to be directly usable by TB, not to go back to Eudora,
then you've decided to feed that output to the other _mutually exclusive_
importer, which was designed to work only with Eudora's _original_ mailboxes.

So let me ask all the spectators in this forum coliseum,
do you give this gladiator's performance a thumbs up, or a thumbs down?

If the latter, I think he should by now know how to start over,
from the beginning (Eudora's original files), without shoving his foot
right into a lion's mouth again :)

--

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 17:24:49 UTC+11, John H Meyers wrote:
> On 11/25/2013 7:27 AM:
> [when running Eudora Rescue]
> > I added the -x=.mbx option, as recommended
>
> There was no "recommendation" -- everything depends upon the specific intended purpose, including for what system the output is intended.
>

> For output intended to be used by Thunderbird, this is not fatal but is wrong, because TB does not expect ".mbx" extensions, so it will use the entire output file name as mailbox name, whereas Eudora necessarily appended required extensions .mbx and .toc, to mailbox names to yield its required internal file names for disk storage.

Perhaps, but since Thunderbird completely failed to import the rescued files, it's of no practical relevance.

> You have, in effect, treated Eudora Rescue as if it were a "mailbox cleaner" for Eudora (just as I was first imagining upon reading your first post), whereas it is instead actually a complete _exporter_ whose output is meant to be used by a _different email system_

Since Thunderbird won't import or recognise it's output, the "intention" has little to do with reality.

> > and the -ft option to get the Thunderbird format message delimiter.

> So you replaced Eudora's original mailboxes (whose message delimiters include "???@???") with the converted output of Eudora Rescue, intended only for Thunderbird, whose message delimiters have now, per your option, replaced every "???@???" with "-" ?

A horrible thing to do, but since it doesn't seem to phase Eudora, inconsequential.

> Eudora mailboxes also each consist of _two_ files each (one .mbx + one .toc), and Eudora Rescue appears to use _both_ of those as input, producing only _one_ output file for use by Unix or Thunderbird, etc., which then leaves Eudora's original ".toc" file an "orphan"

Which Eudora seems toncontinues to use to make sense of the rescued files.

> And then you wonder why TB/OSE's importer from _Eudora's original mailboxes_ may not have recognized anything in the thus mangled Eudora mailboxes that you left in place of the originals?

It can recognise the individual mail files as mail files, but won't open them.
As you pointed out (and I already knew) Eudora OSE is based on an early version of Thunderbird, round about the Thunderbird 1.0 that Eudora Rescue was designed to service.

> This discussion has centered around the existence of two_mutually exclusive_ paths to importing from original Eudora mailboxes, one of which is that you might use _only_ the TB/OSE importer to do the entire job, taking Eudora's _original_ mailboxes as input, vs. the mutually exclusive path of using _only_ Eudora Rescue, which can be considered a complete importer (or exporter) in itself (or possibly together with TB's "Import/Export Tools" extension).

> Note also that _neither_ of those paths was ever supposed to modify Eudora's original mailboxes -- original Eudora should have been left untouched in any way by either one of the mutually exclusive proper strategies of importing.

For the life of me, I can't remember whether I tried to get Eudora OSE to import the original Eudora files (which I've still got, stashed on a corner of the hard disk, as well as on a DVD. My impression is that I tried it, and it didn't work, which is why I dumped the output of Eudora Rescue on top of the original Eudora files, telling it over-write anything with the same name.

Eudora Rescue did chug through that lot, taking some hours to complete the process. The output - as examined by Mozilla Firefox - had been changed, and was a bit more readable, in that the actual text component of the e-mail showed up as more or less coherent chunks of text in the middle of a load of formatting information.

> But you've come along and violated every aspect of what's supposed to be done;
you've clobbered Eudora's original mailboxes by overwriting them with E.R.'s output, where E.R. is by itself basically a complete exporter, whose output is meant to be directly usable by TB, not to go back to Eudora, then you've decided to feed that output to the other _mutually exclusive_ importer, which was designed to work only with Eudora's _original_ mailboxes.

It may have been designed to, but my impression is that it didn't work.

I can use my lap-top as a sandbox to run the process that you think I should have followed - straight from Eudora to Eudora OSE - since it's hard-drive is uncontaminated by Eudora Rescue, or any converted files.

I'll post the results here when I've got around to doing it.

> So let me ask all the spectators in this forum coliseum, do you give this gladiator's performance a thumbs up, or a thumbs down?

Silly question.

> If the latter, I think he should by now know how to start over, from the beginning (Eudora's original files), without shoving his foot right into a lion's mouth again :)

Begs a few questions. Your style does seem to rely more on being rude about what's been done than it does on any kind of demonstrable expertise about what's going on.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 17:24:49 UTC+11, John H Meyers wrote:
> On 11/25/2013 7:27 AM:
> >

<snip>

> So let me ask all the spectators in this forum coliseum, do you give this gladiator's performance a thumbs up, or a thumbs down?
>
> If the latter, I think he should by now know how to start over, from the beginning (Eudora's original files), without shoving his foot right into a lion's mouth again :)

I give myself the thumbs down - though that historically meant that the gladiator was killed, rather than going on to fight another round.

On my lap-top, Eudora OSE did import the original Eudora files. It didn't do it absolutely perfectly - I had a folder embedded in a folder, and that didn't get imported. I've de-embedded the folder in the Eudora directory, which - unsurprisingly - doesn't make any difference in Eudora OSE, so I'm now re-running the importer (which took hours to run. first time around and looks as if it it's going to take just as long this time around.

When I've got Eudora OSE on my lap-top in a state where it can see - and write to - all my imported mail folders. I'll try to install the latest version of Thunderbird, and see if that can see (or import - as a second string) all of Eudora OSE's mail files.

So John H Meyers has given the right advice - more offensively than he needed to, but it's hard to take much offence when you've got the right advice.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
>
>
>
> --

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, 27 November 2013 07:34:18 UTC+11, bill....@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 17:24:49 UTC+11, John H Meyers wrote:
> > On 11/25/2013 7:27 AM:
> > >
> <snip>
>

> On my lap-top, Eudora OSE did import the original Eudora files. It didn't do it absolutely perfectly - I had a folder embedded in a folder, and that didn't get imported. I've de-embedded the folder in the Eudora directory, which - unsurprisingly - doesn't make any difference in Eudora OSE, so I'm now re-running the importer (which took hours to run. first time around and looks as if it it's going to take just as long this time around).

I had to delete the imported files from where they'd ended up - in a parallel directory labelled Thunderbird, which was predictable enough if you know even a little bit about the history of Eudora OSE - before the de-embedded directory would show up after the import, but now it looks just fine - I can read what's in there, write stuff from the Inbox to the relevant file in the de-embedded folder, adn read it in its new location.

First time around I tried to import over the top of the previously imported files, but that didn't install the new top-level de-embedded folder, and still took ages to run.

So now I'll try to install the latest version of Thunderbird, and see if that can see (or import - as a second string) all of Eudora OSE's mail files. Or at least I will once Eudora OSE has finished indexing everything, which looks as if it will take another few hours.

Don't watch this space - this is getting tedious.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[John H Meyers]

On 11/26/2013 1:27 AM, bill wrote:

>> So you replaced Eudora's original mailboxes...

> A horrible thing to do, but since it doesn't seem to phase Eudora, inconsequential.

No, it could be very consequential, but probably most seriously
because some modifications (e.g. -ft) to original Eudora files
(including "out of sync" TOC files, to be explained below)
might have spoiled the subsequent TB/OSE import procedure,
conducted by an entirely different program than Eudora,
whether or not they seem to have upset Eudora itself.

>> Eudora mailboxes also each consist of _two_ files each (one .mbx + one .toc), and Eudora
>> Rescue appears to use _both_ of those as input, producing only _one_ output file for use by
>> Unix or Thunderbird, etc., which then leaves Eudora's original ".toc" file an "orphan"

> Which Eudora seems to continue to use to make sense of the rescued files.

No, it can't possibly do that, because the TOC file contains absolute offsets
to the beginning of each message within the "messages" file (MBX),
and since ER, by various adjustments which it makes, particularly
to headers, and even to the "separator" between messages in your case,
changes the lengths of messages, hence makes the original offsets invalid.

Now Eudora is not oblivious to the possibility that MBX files might get
modified all by themselves somehow, particularly by users who emulate
"sorcerer's apprentices" and don't know what damage they may cause thereby,
so it compares the "last modified" file timestamps of the
MBX and TOC file pairs, and if the MBX timestamp is significantly later
(where the default for "significantly" is a leeway of 10 seconds),
then Eudora detects the need to rebuild the TOC, which it may do
with or without asking the user. Rebuilding the TOC, in turn,
usually causes some loss of TOC-only information, and sometimes
even resurrects deleted or edited messages, but at least
it ends up correcting the vital exact offsets to each message,
which may lull the user into thinking that mucking around
with MBX files outside of normal Eudora operations
was a brilliant (as well as inconsequential :) thing to do.

Before I go any further, I should back up and amend some things
that I earlier said, because I think I've found more of what you
may have relied on in the following section of ER's on-line manual:

<http://qwerky.50webs.com/eudorarescue/readme.htm#thunderbird>

In that section, ER's author points out that ER does not handle
attachments, which means that it does not re-package attachments
so that they become part of legitimate MIME-compliant original
messages. This means that to really end up with what TB needs,
unless you don't even want the attachments re-connected with messages
in TB, it will be necessary to eventually use the TB (or OSE) importer.

Normally, one uses _only_ the TB/OSE importer, whose best version
seems to be the one which came with OSE 1.0 -- however,
even that version, when importing only mail,
is somewhat imperfect -- it may crash only part-way through,
it may fail to recurse into all of Eudora's ".fol" subfolders, etc.,
and in such cases, the usual, tedious way of continuing an
interrupted import is to hide what has already been successfully imported,
then resume by launching TB/OSE again and invoking "Import mail" again,
until eventually it finishes importing all mailboxes.

It might even be necessary to move some mailboxes from a Eudora subfolder
up to the top level to continue, which is even more tedious because you
have to then also move imported mailboxes back to subfolders in TB, but eventually,
most people whose adventures I have followed have come to a successful end.

The idea of using ER on Eudora's original mail store is basically
only to fix some things which TB/OSE's importer might fail to do;
I don't know whether the OSE importer already does those small things
anyway, but apparently the TB importer, as of TB version 2,
had not yet thought of everything, so ER was able to do something useful
to prepare original Eudora info for import by TB.

One of the specific things which ER thought it could to was to correct
TB's failure to preserve message status (from Eudora's TOC files),
for which ER defaults to inserting TB-specific header lines into
each message written to its output mailbox files (which is,
as pointed out above, going to make Eudora's original TOC files
out of sync with converted MBX files).

Just to give you an idea of how Eudora's and TB's developers
were significantly changing the importer for TB version 3 and OSE,
here is one single "Bugzilla" case history,
in which Qualcomm's Geoffrey Wenger and Mozilla's David Bienvenu
go back & forth about how each one's code changes affect the other,
sometimes adversely:

Bug 368347 - Importer (Win Eudora, Mail)
does not import message STATUS (read, unread, etc..)
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368347>

If OSE 1.0 had already fixed that, as is claimed,
then there was no need for ER to be used before the OSE importer,
at least not for that particular part of what ER was created for,
but the importer which comes with later versions of TB
may never have included the fix claimed for OSE,
which took TB 3.0.4 as a starting point for producing "OSE 1.0,"
from which Mozilla did not take anything as it kept on modifying
only its "main branch" of TB code for various related Mozilla products.

At any rate, the very detailed instructions by ER's author
for using ER as an intermediate step between Eudora and TB,
said to first "compact" all the Eudora mailboxes (did you?)

It then gives very detailed instructions for using original Eudora input
and a DIFFERENT TEMPORARY PLACE for ER's output, and at this time, the only
suggested ER option (beside location of input or output) is -x=.mbx,
which you said was "recommended" -- yes, it was, after all,
because subsequent use of the TB importer was to follow,
but I would have chosen option -fe (leave separators in Eudora format)
rather than -ft (change separators to TB format, even though output
was to continue to represent legitimate Eudora mailbox format),
and replacement of Eudora's original files with ER output was never suggested,
which might have caused problems for Eudora which you have yet to discover,
for all you know (so I'd tell onlookers "don't do that in your own home" :)

ER's author then gives a tedious procedure for TEMPORARILY swapping
the original Eudora files with the temporary output files from ER,
prior to using TB to import ER's output files,
then to swap those back again, so that Eudora's original files
would finally be left as they were, untouched.

The reason for all that swapping was that TB/OSE's importer
uses a specific Windows Registry key to find the last-used
command line which launched Eudora, from which it locates
the data files to import. ER's author figured to swap
all the data files, once before TB/OSE's importing
and again re-swapping afterward, instead of just
modifying the registry key that the importer uses
(HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Qualcomm\Eudora\CommandLine) or else
(HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Software\Qualcomm\Eudora\CommandLine\Current)
which is actually a lot easier, because you don't have to restore
either key afterward, since Eudora is going to merely
set it again, each time it is launched again.

The value to set for that key should have a second path
(using "8.3" file names or else a fully quoted complete path)
to the directory from which TB/OSE
should take its input (files to be imported).

>> And then you wonder why TB/OSE's importer from _Eudora's original mailboxes_ may not have
>> recognized anything in the thus mangled Eudora mailboxes that you left in place of the
>> originals?

> It can recognise the individual mail files as mail files, but won't open them. As you pointed
> out (and I already knew) Eudora OSE is based on an early version of Thunderbird, round about the
> Thunderbird 1.0 that Eudora Rescue was designed to service.

If TB won't open a file as a mailbox, then that's what I would call
"NOT recognizing the file as a mail file" ;-)

BTW, TB also has a kind of "index" for every mailbox file,
having file name extension ".msf" -- this index is very different
from Eudora's, and TB has its own way for re-generating it.

OSE is based on TB 3.0.4 -- one of the reasons why it took
years longer than expected to even arrive as far as OSE went
is that Mozilla's original development of TBv3 was painfully slow,
and Qualcomm had to start with a ready-for-full-release
version of TB before even applying its own changes
to make any of its "beta" versions of what eventually became OSE.

ER seems to have had no idea about TB3's future development,
which puts it in a very peculiar position as to whether
there is any need (or potential harm) in using ER
to modify Eudora's original mailboxes (and drop all TOCs)
before using a much later importer that was already
being designed to handle some of what ER was created for.

> For the life of me, I can't remember whether I tried to get Eudora OSE to import the original
> Eudora files (which I've still got, stashed on a corner of the hard disk, as well as on a DVD.
> My impression is that I tried it, and it didn't work, which is why I dumped the output of Eudora
> Rescue on top of the original Eudora files, telling it over-write anything with the same name.

Attempting to use read-only Eudora files (as files on a DVD tend to appear)
is usually unsuccessful.

Your shortcut to not use an intermediate output area for ER output
left out-of-sync TOC files in the original Eudora area
(at least as of immediately after using ER),
as well as mailbox files already modified as if ready for TB's use,
so with all your personal modifications, who would know what to expect?

> Eudora Rescue did chug through that lot, taking some hours to complete the process. The output -
> as examined by Mozilla Firefox - had been changed, and was a bit more readable, in that the
> actual text component of the e-mail showed up as more or less coherent chunks of text in the
> middle of a load of formatting information.

Since ER does not even claim to do the transformation you observed,
I rather think that what you observed
may be an artifact of using a _web browser_ to display a mailbox file,
rather than using a _plain text viewer_

For more histories of people trying to use ER between Eudora and TB,
Google this: "Eudora rescue" site:mozillazine.org

This whole affair reminds me of a once famous cartoon:
<http://www.businessballs.com/images/treeswing/tree-swing-s-hogh.jpg>
<http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/475/749/fd8.jpg>
<http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/10/the-classic-tree-swing-example-of-production-and-customer-service-gone-awry/>

And here's the Sorcerer's Apprentice, as animated by Disney's studio:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWZJcKM8pO0>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasia_(film)>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice_(Dukas)>

> I can use my laptop as a sandbox to run the process that you think I should have followed -

> straight from Eudora to Eudora OSE - since it's hard-drive is uncontaminated by Eudora Rescue,
> or any converted files.
>
> I'll post the results here when I've got around to doing it.

> Your style does seem to rely more on being rude about what's been done...

More about how "what's been done" had to be dragged out of you,
instead of your giving enough info to avoid wasting anyone else's time.

My view is that anyone wanting a consultant can hire and pay a consultant
to conduct said kind of interviewing, or can "pay" for the free consulting
by bringing the facts to light up front, which I think it very rude
to have not done in the first place, particularly when done by someone
who is already experienced in the computing field.

> than it does on any kind of demonstrable expertise about what's going on.

That reminds me of a remark attributed to Mark Twain:

"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant
I could hardly stand to have the old man around.
But when I got to be twenty-one,
I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years.�

Twain spoke in many places without every word being
written down, but here's a "term paper" sized study about it,
which unfortunately fails to observe how true is the sentiment
anyway, as well as how in character for that author:
<http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/10/10/twain-father/>

--

[John H Meyers]

On 11/26/2013 2:34 PM, bill wrote:

> On my lap-top, Eudora OSE did import the original Eudora files.
> It didn't do it absolutely perfectly - I had a folder embedded in a folder,
> and that didn't get imported. I've de-embedded the folder in the Eudora directory,
> which - unsurprisingly - doesn't make any difference in Eudora OSE,
> so I'm now re-running the importer (which took hours to run. first time around
> and looks as if it it's going to take just as long this time around.

Any mailboxes already converted can be "hidden"
so that further invocations of the importer
need work only on what remains to be converted.

Your "de-embedding" idea is indeed also what
previous adventurers have recommended.

> When I've got Eudora OSE on my lap-top in a state where it can see -
> and write to - all my imported mail folders. I'll try to install
> the latest version of Thunderbird, and see if that can see
> (or import - as a second string) all of Eudora OSE's mail files.

I would try to finish all importing of all mailboxes via OSE.

BTW, OSE and TB have different default locations for program files,
but a common default for TB profiles (user data), so one can
_install_ both OSE and TB without conflict between program files,
but flipping between OSE and TB for _using_ a common converted profile
can cause small glitches, possibly increasing in later TB versions
(if a major change in TB's mailbox storage comes to pass,
that might introduce a big new complication).

> So John H Meyers has given the right advice - more offensively than he needed to,
> but it's hard to take much offence when you've got the right advice.

At least that's what we say while our stockbroker multiplies our fortune,
but alas, Bernard Madoff was also thus praised as his Ponzi scheme grew,
as was Enron while its quarterly reports continued to glow,
and so were some of the "finest names" in U.S.A. banking,
until their similar way of foisting junk investments in real estate
onto customers such as pension funds, other banks, their own stockholders, etc.
led to a world-wide financial crisis and so many personal losses.

In this email business, however, I don't think we can fake the results.

I'm glad for you to have found something which works
(and I'd be glad also to hear if you have learned more
about the subject[s] in general, since I fancy myself
to be a decent teacher and to deepen others' knowledge,
which should turn out to better empower them to help themselves),
and I appreciate your not finding me so offensive, in the end.

Best wishes.

--

[John H Meyers]

On 11/27/2013 1:11 AM, bill wrote:

> I had to delete the imported files from where they'd ended up -
> in a parallel directory labelled Thunderbird, which was predictable enough
> if you know even a little bit about the history of Eudora OSE -
> before the de-embedded directory would show up after the import,
> but now it looks just fine - I can read what's in there,
> write stuff from the Inbox to the relevant file in the de-embedded folder,

> and read it in its new location.

I think I know a lot about the history of Eudora OSE,
yet I have no idea what you mean by any of what you just wrote
(does anyone else perceive clearly what he means?)

> First time around I tried to import over the previously imported files,

> but that didn't install the new top-level de-embedded folder

I think I'm having another Yank <-> Aussie translation problem here;
all I know is that breaking the job down into smaller chunks
was usually successful in the past, and since neither Eudora
nor OSE has changed a bit since then, I don't know why
the situation should be different now.

> and still took ages to run

Why not crank up your CPU clock, turn on the water-cooling system,
and make a nice pot of hot tea on it while waiting?

In 1968, the comedy "Hot Millions" (starring Peter Ustinov,
Maggie Smith, Karl Malden, Bob Newheart, Robert Morley,
co-written by Ustinov)
had the quaint idea of a computer whose records were protected
just like a bank vault, with physical locks and alarms,
yet was accidentally broken into by a cleaning lady
who wanted to heat her tea over the computer's innards --
what a prescient thought!
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063094/>
<http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/3471/Hot-Millions/videos.html>

> So now I'll try to install the latest version of Thunderbird,
> and see if that can see (or import - as a second string)
> all of Eudora OSE's mail files.

OSE is Thunderbird, which select a user "profile" (akin to
"Eudora Folder") exactly the same way, so we can hope to hear
that this goes well, perhaps only with selecting different
columns to be displayed (e.g. OSE has a "Who" column
in mailboxes, which TB hasn't).

> Or at least I will once Eudora OSE has finished indexing everything,
> which looks as if it will take another few hours.

Global indexing can be turned off.

> Bill Sloman, Sydney

If I had a house like this in my neighborhood,
I wouldn't be spending my time puttering around with Eudora:
<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Sydney_Opera_House_Australia.jpg>
[large hi-res image, may need shrinking to view :]

Why do I think I once saw James Bond racing around that place?
Was it a dream, a delusion, or did it actually happen?

Well, I did spend some time at this alternate Bond scene,
having equally breathtaking views:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piz_Gloria>
<http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2UAHfguP4I8/UCfFyz_DfFI/AAAAAAAABd4/UKTmSZ4lQvM/s1600/piz_gloria_002_eca93839e8478fa5d5de550db3219637.jpg>
<http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HAEMkQlUbY0/UCfFn1m6VoI/AAAAAAAABdw/4CBQvYPNQxQ/s1600/schilthorn+1.jpg>

--

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Thursday, 28 November 2013 21:22:26 UTC+11, John H Meyers wrote:
> On 11/26/2013 2:34 PM, bill wrote:
>
> > On my lap-top, Eudora OSE did import the original Eudora files.
>
> > It didn't do it absolutely perfectly - I had a folder embedded in a folder, and that didn't get imported. I've de-embedded the folder in the Eudora directory, which - unsurprisingly - doesn't make any difference in Eudora OSE,
so I'm now re-running the importer (which took hours to run. first time around and looks as if it it's going to take just as long this time around.
>

> Any mailboxes already converted can be "hidden" so that further invocations of the import need work only on what remains to be converted.

If I dragged them off and hid them in another directory, would Eudora OSE know that they were there when I dragged them back? I imagine it is just looking for files and directories, so it ought to work, but "ought" and "will" aren't quite the same.

> Your "de-embedding" idea is indeed also what previous adventurers have recommended.
>
> > When I've got Eudora OSE on my lap-top in a state where it can see - and write to - all my imported mail folders. I'll try to install the latest version of Thunderbird, and see if that can see (or import - as a second string) all of Eudora OSE's mail files.
>
> I would try to finish all importing of all mailboxes via OSE.

As I did.

> BTW, OSE and TB have different default locations for program files, but a common default for TB profiles (user data), so one can _install_ both OSE and TB without conflict between program files, but flipping between OSE and TB for _using_ a common converted profile can cause small glitches, possibly increasing in later TB versions (if a major change in TB's mailbox storage comes to pass, that might introduce a big new complication).

As I mentioned when I started this thread, I ignore the installer recommendations to put the program files in C:/Program Files/whatever, and actually stick them in C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/whatever.

Windows 7 didn't like Eudora in "Program Files" and "AppData" worked out fine.

Once I'd got Eudora OSE to import all my mail files. I downloaded the latest Version of Thunderbird, and installed it in C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird - where the imported Eudora OSE files had already ended up(presumably because Eudora OSE is essentially a shell built on an early release of Thunderbird, as we all seem to know).

Thunderbird installed without drama, and could see the Eudora OSE local folder - with all the imported mail files - from the start. I didn't have to run the Thuderbird importer.

So the job worked on my lap-top, which I was using as a sandbox. Repeating it my desk-top machine is going to be more work. I'll have to do a bit of cutting and pasting to get the last few weeks of e-mail traffic shifted into backed-up uncorrupted Eudora 7.1.0.9 mail files, then delete all the Rescued/corrupted mail files before I instal Eudora OSE again and do the job right.

Since Eudora 7.1.0.9 works fine at the moment, I'm a bit short on motivation, but it's not being maintained any more, any more than Eudora OSE, so it's got to be prudent to migrate to thinderbird, which is being maintained.

> > So John H Meyers has given the right advice - more offensively than he needed to, but it's hard to take much offence when you've got the right advice.
>

> At least that's what we say while our stockbroker multiplies our fortune, but alas, Bernard Madoff was also thus praised as his Ponzi scheme grew, as was Enron while its quarterly reports continued to glow, and so were some of the "finest names" in U.S.A. banking, until their similar way of foisting junk investments in real estat onto customers such as pension funds, other banks, their own stockholders, etc. led to a world-wide financial crisis and so many personal losses.

>
> In this email business, however, I don't think we can fake the results.

It's all a bit more hands-on here.

> I'm glad for you to have found something which works(and I'd be glad also to hear if you have learned more about the subject[s] in general, since I fancy myself to be a decent teacher and to deepen others' knowledge, which should turn out to better empower them to help themselves), and I appreciate your not finding me so offensive, in the end.

I've posted - on sci.electronics.design, which is where I mostly hang out - that being too polite doesn't work. People don't notice that you've told them that you have got it wrong if you sweeten the pill too much.

You've found a style that clearly works for you. My feeling is that you could go easier on the pontification and still have a recipe that works - but here I am pontificating away myself, when I should be expressing my gratitude for the education I've clearly acquired, and ignoring the bits that got up my nose.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Monday, 2 December 2013 03:29:00 UTC+11, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Nov 2013 20:16:57 -0800 (PST), bill....@gmail.com declaimed
>
> the following:

>
> >As I mentioned when I started this thread, I ignore the installer recommendations to put the program files in C:/Program Files/whatever, and actually stick them in C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/whatever.
> >
> >Windows 7 didn't like Eudora in "Program Files" and "AppData" worked out fine.
> >

>Well - if you are on a 64-bit Win7, it should have been "Program File (x86)"
>
> Mine runs great installed at:
>
> "C:\Program Files (x86)\Qualcomm\Eudora\Eudora.exe"
>
> (Note: Win7-64 should automatically translate a 32-bit installer to put stuff in the (x86) directory; you should only have a problem if you hand-entered the program directory).

Microsoft may have cleaned up it's act in the last few years. I had trouble when I installed Eudora in "Program Files" on my first Windows 7 machine, and - at the time - got a long and technical verbal explanation from a Microsoft Evangelist (his job title within Microsoft - believe it or not) as to why this had been a bad idea. He's the son of a friend of mine, and I got the story over dinner at the friend's place.

The shift to Users\Me\AppData\Roaming\ happened around then and the problems went away. Microsoft may have found a better way of fixing the problem - with security and write permissions - since then.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[John H Meyers]

On 12/2/2013 11:28 PM, bill wrote:

> I had trouble when I installed Eudora in "Program Files" on my first Windows 7 machine

The phrase "I installed Eudora in..." is often a hint that the user has
put both the program files and data files into the same directory,
which Eudora's installer makes all too easy to continue doing,
despite that from the release of Windows 2000 onward, Qualcomm has,
in its tech support notes, been saying that program files
and data files should be separated.

Any trouble caused by keeping _both_ Qualcomm's program files
and your personal data (mail, settings, and everything else)
in more strongly protected "program files" directories,
in all Windows editions since Vista, arises not because
Qualcomm's programs are installed where Windows suggests,
but solely because the user's own data files, if you attempt to
keep them in the same place, become "read-only" in that same location,
although Windows then invisibly relocates all subsequent writing
(updating or new file creation) to a different hidden place
(under symbolic Windows path %LocalAppData%\VirtualStore )
in the user's Windows profile.

We've for years been advising that new installs should
leave the original default locations as suggested,
including "User's Application Data Folder"
( %AppData%\Qualcomm\Eudora ) for the user's files,
unless the user prefers to use a different drive for user files,
because even the default "data" location is more protected
by Windows than other locations, particularly against any other
Windows user (e.g. keeps Dad's mail from being read by Kid).

My grandmother used to say "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,"
which of course meant that it is all to easy to get into trouble
by knowing enough to start influencing things, but not enough
to fully understand the implications or the consequences.
Like the "Sorcerer's apprentice," without a mentor,
we then hold various false notions and take unwise actions.
Sometimes we are even so bold as to try to tell others
that we know enough to mentor them,
steering them away from more fully seasoned mentors,
and this then only creates more misguided apprentices,
who have even less of an idea where to turn for guidance.

If this occurred only in regard to some email client,
the consequences would be limited in scope, but unfortunately,
the same thing occurs in every field vital for humanity,
including economics, politics, health,
the education of future generations.
and the stewardship of our environment, about which Buckminster Fuller
wrote a short book called "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth."

If there's anything to worry about in this planet's affairs,
I think it would be that no one in the next generation
bothers to read the manual.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_Manual_for_Spaceship_Earth>
<http://designsciencelab.com/resources/OperatingManual_BF.pdf>

"I am enthusiastic over humanity's extraordinary
and sometimes very timely ingenuities.
If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone,
a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat
that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver.
But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver
is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a
great many piano tops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings
as constituting the only means for solving a given problem." [R.B.F.]

--

[John H Meyers]

JHM wrote:

> Any mailboxes already converted can be "hidden"

> so that further invocations of the importer

> need work only on what remains to be converted.

On 11/30/2013 10:16 PM, bill wrote:

> If I dragged them off and hid them in another directory,
> would Eudora OSE know that they were there when I dragged them back?

Has the entire context been lost?

Here's an outline of what goes on, and when:

Using Eudora: read/write only in Eudora data directory.
Importing: read original Eudora area -> write separate TB/OSE area.
Using OSE: read/write only in TB/OSE data directory (profile).

OR

Using Eudora: read/write only in Eudora data directory.
Eudora Rescue: read original Eudora area, write temporary area,
and adjust Registry or use temp area during one Eudora launch.
Importing: read temporary area -> write separate TB/OSE area.
Using OSE: read/write only in TB/OSE data directory (profile).


Either way, importing may be done in stages,
upon only one subset at a time of the mailboxes.

> As I mentioned when I started this thread,
> I ignore the installer recommendations to put the program files
> in C:/Program Files/whatever, and actually stick them
> in C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/whatever.

If you did that with both OSE and with Thunderbird,
installing each into the same directory, then you've
mixed _some_ unrelated program files together.

> Windows 7 didn't like Eudora in "Program Files"

Windows 7 will NEVER "not like" installing Eudora's
PROGRAM files into the normal "program files" locations.

> and "AppData" worked out fine

PROGRAM files belong in "program files" directories.
USER files belong in user directories.

That's been Windows "standard model"
(required for any application
to get "Windows Certified" by Microsoft)
ever since the initial release of Windows 2000.

In letting its installer continue, since that time,
to present any choice for a user
to combine his/her data with program files,
Qualcomm has done something like
offering methanol to customers instead of ethanol,
which many a "bootlegger" also did
during the "prohibition" era [of alcoholic beverages]
in U.S. history, and plenty of its customers
have ended up sick or blind, data-wise and security-wise,
as a result of this "generosity."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol>

Apparently, methanol preceded ethanol
(by about 30 years)
as a fuel additive for motor vehicles.

If anyone knows how to construct a "wormhole"
across intergalactic space, a fortune (as well as
a solution to all of Earth's puny energy crises)
might be made from this:

"In 2006, astronomers using the MERLIN array
of radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank Observatory
discovered a large cloud of methanol in space,
288 billion miles across."

--

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, 4 December 2013 17:15:36 UTC+11, John H Meyers wrote:
> JHM wrote:
>
> > Any mailboxes already converted can be "hidden" so that further invocations of the importer need work only on what remains to be converted.

> On 11/30/2013 10:16 PM, bill wrote:
>
> > If I dragged them off and hid them in another directory, would Eudora OSE know that they were there when I dragged them back?
>
> Has the entire context been lost?
>
> Here's an outline of what goes on, and when:
>
> Using Eudora: read/write only in Eudora data directory.
>
> Importing: read original Eudora area -> write separate TB/OSE area.
>
> Using OSE: read/write only in TB/OSE data directory (profile).
>
> OR
>
> Using Eudora: read/write only in Eudora data directory.
>

> Eudora Rescue: read original Eudora area, write temporary area and adjust Registry or use temp area during one Eudora launch.

>
> Importing: read temporary area -> write separate TB/OSE area.
>
> Using OSE: read/write only in TB/OSE data directory (profile).
>
> Either way, importing may be done in stages, upon only one subset at a time of the mailboxes.

Since Eudora OSE seems to have the slightly counter-intuitive trick of creating a parallel Thunderbird directory for it's imported mail files (and doesn't seem to tell you about this)none of this was all that obvious.

> > As I mentioned when I started this thread,
>
> > I ignore the installer recommendations to put the program files in C:/Program Files/whatever, and actually stick them in C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/whatever.
>
> If you did that with both OSE and with Thunderbird, installing each into the same directory, then you've mixed _some_ unrelated program files together.

But I didn't. OSE went into C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Eudor_OSE and Thunderbird went into C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird. Eudora went into C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Qualcomm/Eudora


OSE's imported local folders went into C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird which I hadn't expected, but didn't have any trouble understanding (as I mentioned at the time).

> > Windows 7 didn't like Eudora in "Program Files"
>
> Windows 7 will NEVER "not like" installing Eudora's PROGRAM files into the normal "program files" locations.
>

> > and "AppData" worked out fine.

>
> PROGRAM files belong in "program files" directories.

Not a distinction the Eudora installer was paying attention to at the time. It stuck the user files in the program directory - which, in hindsight, wasn't clever.

> USER files belong in user directories.
>
> That's been Windows "standard model"(required for any application to get "Windows Certified" by Microsoft) ever since the initial release of Windows 2000.

But my Microsoft Evangelist didn't bother explaining this to me when I ran into trouble, and I've not seen it spelled out anywhere since. I've not been obsessively involved in getting programs to work, but I'd have expected to see it spelled out someplace over the last few years.

> In letting its installer continue, since that time, to present any choice for a user to combine his/her data with program files, Qualcomm has done something like offering methanol to customers instead of ethanol, which many a "bootlegger" also did during the "prohibition" era [of alcoholic beverages]in U.S. history, and plenty of its customers have ended up sick or blind, data-wise and security-wise, as a result of this "generosity."

Methanol (CH3OH) does permanent damage. Putting the data files in the wrong place is a recoverable error.

> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol>
>
> Apparently, methanol preceded ethanol(by about 30 years) as a fuel additive for motor vehicles.

You can burn lots of inflammable liquids in car engines. Whether you should depends on quite a few different variables. As even wikipedia points out, high concentrations of methanol can corrode aluminium remarkably effectively - it reacts with alumina to form aluminium methoxides which are soluble in methanol, so the normal passivating layer of alumina gets eroded away.

> If anyone knows how to construct a "wormhole" across intergalactic space, a fortune (as well as a solution to all of Earth's puny energy crises) might be made from this:
>
> "In 2006, astronomers using the MERLIN array of radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank Observatory discovered a large cloud of methanol in space, 288 billion miles across."

The wormhole could very well destroy the earth in the process, and the wormhole technology would probably have more useful and less potentially dangerous applications than that of harvesting very dilute clouds of methanol from a very long way away.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[John H Meyers]

On 12/4/2013 1:35 AM, an ever amusing saga continues:

> Eudora OSE seems to have the slightly counter-intuitive trick

> of creating a parallel Thunderbird directory for its imported mail files

This was said once before, and I could not imagine what it meant,
but perhaps there are clues further below:

> Thunderbird went into C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird

Thunderbird requires at least one vitally important user file (profiles.ini)
to reside in a directory at the Windows symbolic path %AppData%\Thunderbird
(which in Vista thru Win8 would usually be at the specific path you indicated),
and both the required directory and the required Profiles.ini file
are created (if they do not already exist) by installing Thunderbird.

The profiles.ini file, in turn, indicates where
one or more complete user data directories (profiles) reside,
as well as which one is the current default. These profiles
are often in a default "Profiles" directory within that same path,
but a user can also create or move profiles to any other location(s).

> OSE's imported local folders went into C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird
> which I hadn't expected

OSE is itself a version of Thunderbird, and could even have been considered
an "upgrade" of Thunderbird, as of the initial release of OSE, so it was
designed that OSE would _share_ the exact same Profiles.ini file
and also any current user data in any Thunderbird profile(s).

At the same time, OSE's installers did not consider OSE's program files
to be identical substitutions for TB's, so the default program files
locations were never the same for OSE vs. Thunderbird,
even though the data files absolutely coincide.

>> PROGRAM files belong in "program files" directories

> Not a distinction the Eudora installer was paying attention to at the time.
> It stuck the user files in the program directory -
> which, in hindsight, wasn't clever.

Not only wasn't it clever, but it wasn't even that installer's own decision,
because the only thing which can lead the installer to suggest any non-standard location
is if the USER has previously made that decision himself (and perhaps forgotten it),
causing the installer to detect that and, as it were, to say to itself
"well, the user told me before to do that, so I'd better repeat his own
earlier choice, or else we may lose the last previous set of files that he was using,"
or else, of course, for the user to make that choice himself as he installs Eudora.

In some cases the "previous choice" is simply that the user has merely _copied_
all files from one computer to another, in place of actually using the installer at all,
which was also once a common habit that persists to this day, among users who are
intimately familiar with how loose and uncaring Windows was, all the way up to
Windows 98, with what is now considered important "hygiene" in Windows.

> I ignore the installer recommendations
> to put the program files in C:/Program Files/whatever,
> and actually stick them in C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/whatever.

You have managed to be the only person I have ever known
to mix program and data files by installing the programs
where only the data belongs, rather than by keeping the data
where only the programs belong -- shouldn't there be
a cleverness prize for being the only person
with sufficient imagination to create an "exclusive"
unique arrangement like this? ;-)

>> If you did that with both OSE and with Thunderbird,
>> installing each into the same directory,
>> then you've mixed _some_ unrelated program files together.

> But I didn't. OSE went into C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Eudor_OSE

I don't think the OSE installer (which is just a modified TB installer)
ever defaulted to putting anything at that path -- neither programs
nor data -- hence that you must have told it to do so at least once before,
after which the usual "suggestion" for re-installing program files
is automatically based upon a previous installation's location.

The unfortunate additional analogy now occurring to me
is that once lost, ever, virginity is difficult to regain,
even if the participant was not even quite conscious
of what was going on, back at the original moment.

> my Microsoft Evangelist didn't bother explaining this to me
> when I ran into trouble, and I've not seen it spelled out anywhere since.
> I've not been obsessively involved in getting programs to work,
> but I'd have expected to see it spelled out someplace over the last few years.

Did your personal evangelist say which type of evangelist (s)he is?
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/bb905078.aspx>
(these are obviously all oriented to manufacturers, not to consumers)

Microsoft spells out its software certification requirements
to companies wanting to get their highly technical products certified,
and does not aim this information toward ordinary consumers, e.g.:
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd203105.aspx>
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd371701(v=vs.85).aspx>
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465094.aspx>
(this contains very technical details, "above the pay grade" of most users :)

"At the end of the day," as they say, I aim my own advice
to the user who wants to avoid needing any future help,
suggesting simple and foolproof default ways
to avoid the sort of problems which regularly occur
to overly imaginative people who make up their own rules,
while knowing a bit less than would qualify them to lead
a software development team, nor even enough to completely know
all the consequences of all possible deviations
from recommended default actions.

> Putting the data files in the wrong place is a recoverable error.

That depends on which "wrong place" -- when it comes to data files
attempting to reside in Windows' "program files" folders,
ending up being split between there and "VirtualStore" locations,
what it takes to really fully recover is quite a challenge,
for both the patient and doctors, and my stomach heaves
every time it comes up again, because it's such a drain,
and I really don't have that much time to spare from my "day job."

This may also further explain why I appreciate users
who come to the table with details already gathered and presentable,
much as I do before going to anyone for a free consultation,
anywhere from an internet board to a law or other business office,
believing that they will do more for me if I value their own time
at least as much as mine, and also free them to spend their time
only on that which requires their own expertise, rather than
having to waste some of that time finding out what I should already know.

As to pursuing my methanol analogy, I'm still ready to send
"space cadet" Sarah Palin (a political figure in the USA)
out to drill toward that 288 billion mile wide methanol reserve,
if only she can manage to point in the right direction, for a change ;-)

--

[John H Meyers]

On 12/4/2013 6:13 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

>> "In 2006, astronomers using the MERLIN array
>> of radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank Observatory
>> discovered a large cloud of methanol in space,
>> 288 billion miles across."

> Ethanol found in space ("Pure Vodka!")...
> and the resultant party to end all parties <G>

Beware of importing that vodka from the same country
which sold poisonous anti-freeze as food/medical grade glycol
(ethylene glycol vs. propylene glycol)
and milk powder laced with ground plastic (melamine)
to increase its "protein" assay, etc. --
"just innocent little mistakes by someone just learning English,
after all, and they even tasted 1/4 teaspoon of it to be sure."

"Methanol vs Ethanol" -- another opportunity lurks -- say,
I wonder whether we could pawn it off on the Klingons,
who could "pay" by making the "Grays" go home,
and stop mutilating our cows?

Wouldn't it be great if Klingon metabolism is actually
the reverse of ours, and we could trade the methanol
for ethanol? But I live in a "corn growing state,"
and that would depress the market for corn that's used
to make ethanol (not to drink, but instead to drive) --
is there nothing which doesn't have some "gotcha" in it, somewhere?
(so no wonder the U.S. Congress is "dead in the water")

Have a nice Spring week and a fantastic Summer
(in Australia -- that's Bill I'm talking to now :)

--

[bill....@gmail.com]

On Thursday, 5 December 2013 03:27:59 UTC+11, John H Meyers wrote:
> On 12/4/2013 1:35 AM, an ever amusing saga continues:
>

> > Eudora OSE seems to have the slightly counter-intuitive trick of creating a parallel Thunderbird directory for its imported mail files.

>
> This was said once before, and I could not imagine what it meant, but perhaps there are clues further below:
>
> > Thunderbird went into C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird
>
> Thunderbird requires at least one vitally important user file (profiles.ini) to reside in a directory at the Windows symbolic path %AppData%\Thunderbird (which in Vista thru Win8 would usually be at the specific path you indicated),
and both the required directory and the required Profiles.ini file are created (if they do not already exist) by installing Thunderbird.
>
> The profiles.ini file, in turn, indicates where
one or more complete user data directories (profiles) reside, as well as which one is the current default. These profiles are often in a default "Profiles" directory within that same path, but a user can also create or move profiles to any other location(s).

So unsophisticated users have to thrash around a bit to find them - if they know enough to look for them.

> > OSE's imported local folders went into C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird which I hadn't expected
>
> OSE is itself a version of Thunderbird, and could even have been considered an "upgrade" of Thunderbird, as of the initial release of OSE, so it was designed that OSE would _share_ the exact same Profiles.ini file and also any current user data in any Thunderbird profile(s).
>
> At the same time, OSE's installers did not consider OSE's program files to be identical substitutions for TB's, so the default program files locations were never the same for OSE vs. Thunderbird, even though the data files absolutely coincide.
>
> >> PROGRAM files belong in "program files" directories
>

> > Not a distinction the Eudora installer was paying attention to at the time.It stuck the user files in the program directory - which, in hindsight, wasn't clever.
>
> Not only wasn't it clever, but it wasn't even that installer's own decision, because the only thing which can lead the installer to suggest any non-standard location is if the USER has previously made that decision himself (and perhaps forgotten it) causing the installer to detect that and, as it were, to say to itself "well, the user told me before to do that, so I'd better repeat his own earlier choice, or else we may lose the last previous set of files that he was using, or else, of course, for the user to make that choice himself as he installs Eudora.

>
> In some cases the "previous choice" is simply that the user has merely _copied_ all files from one computer to another, in place of actually using the installer at all, which was also once a common habit that persists to this day, among users who are intimately familiar with how loose and uncaring Windows was, all the way up to Windows 98, with what is now considered important "hygiene" in Windows.

I always installed Eudora again on an new computer I moved it to, but I also copied all the mail folders across from one computer to the next. There are messages in the mail folders dating back to the beginning of 2000, which predates XP - presumably I was using Win 98 back then.

> > I ignore the installer recommendations to put the program files in C:/Program Files/whatever, and actually stick them in C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/whatever.
>
> You have managed to be the only person I have ever known to mix program and data files by installing the programs where only the data belongs, rather than by keeping the data where only the programs belong -- shouldn't there be a cleverness prize for being the only person with sufficient imagination to create an "exclusive" unique arrangement like this? ;-)

It worked, and keeps on working

> >> If you did that with both OSE and with Thunderbird, installing each into the same directory, then you've mixed _some_ unrelated program files together.
>
> > But I didn't. OSE went into C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/Eudor_OSE
>
> I don't think the OSE installer (which is just a modified TB installer) ever defaulted to putting anything at that path -- neither programs
nor data -- hence that you must have told it to do so at least once before, after which the usual "suggestion" for re-installing program files is automatically based upon a previous installation's location.

Once dumping the program files into the AppData area had worked for Eudora, I figured that it would also work for Thunderbird and Eudora OSE, which it did.

> The unfortunate additional analogy now occurring to me is that once lost, ever, virginity is difficult to regain, even if the participant was not even quite conscious of what was going on, back at the original moment.
>
> > my Microsoft Evangelist didn't bother explaining this to me when I ran into trouble, and I've not seen it spelled out anywhere since.
>

> > I've not been obsessively involved in getting programs to work but I'd have expected to see it spelled out someplace over the last few years.

>
> Did your personal evangelist say which type of evangelist (s)he is? <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/bb905078.aspx>

(these are obviously all oriented to manufacturers, not to consumers).

Not that I've noticed, but he is based in Australia, and may have to cover a broader range than his US counterparts.

<snip>

> This may also further explain why I appreciate users
who come to the table with details already gathered and presentable, much as I do before going to anyone for a free consultation, anywhere from an internet board to a law or other business office, believing that they will do more for me if I value their own time at least as much as mine, and also free them to spend their time only on that which requires their own expertise, rather than having to waste some of that time finding out what I should already know.

This is an admirable ambition, but it falls flat at the first hurdle, which is that the expert you are consulting knows a lot more about the subject than you do, so you always find that your carefully assembled data is inadequate and lots of bits of it are irrelevant.

Professionals who get snotty about the inadequate quality of the data that their customers put together don't get a lot of repeat business - the more useful reaction to politely ask for more.

> As to pursuing my methanol analogy, I'm still ready to send "space cadet" Sarah Palin (a political figure in the USA) out to drill toward that 288 billion mile wide methanol reserve if only she can manage to point in the right direction, for a change ;-)

Sarah Palin reliably points in the far-right direction. I'd be quite happy to see her sent into outer space, were it not for the risk that extra-terrestrials might take her to be a representative sample of the human species. If Tina Fey had invented her, she'd be an overdrawn lampoon. As it is she's just a horrible example.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[davele...@gmail.com]

Hi Guys,

Wow!

I found this thread via Google search for Eudora problems I have been having. I am strictly a USER of Eudora and not anywhere near the level of you guys, but I do have a somewhat similar problem(s). My comments here are directed to John H Meyers, or anyone else with expertise with the old Eudora or newer email clients that (hopefully) may be as good as the old Eudora.

I started with paid versions of Eudora about year 2000. I went through several upgrades of versions, paying each time. I am unclear as to what actually happened to Eudora and don't really have a need to know the story. What I do know is that it seems to have self destructed. The last version that I paid for was 6.2.5.6 which for years regularly had problems with "unhandled exceptions" or something to that effect, where it would just shut down and I would have to restart it. Sorry, I did not keep good notes. I changed over several computers with no problems. The screen on the next to the last laptop computer with Windows XP starting going out, getting filled with lines. I got a new laptop with Win7. The old one still works but I have to use an external screen, which obviously is cumbersome when I need to move around.

I had a hard problem getting 6.2.5.6 to run on the new laptop with Win7. As a workaround I used an external hard drive with the program and data files running on the E drive of the new laptop with Win7. Compatibility mode or something to that effect makes it work somehow. Still had problems with unhandled exceptions and other things so thought maybe the Eudora program had gotten corrupted. So I tried re-downloading the old 6.2.5.6 from Qualcomm/Eudora to see if that would fix it. The new download would not recognize that I had a paid version and it reverted to the lite version which would not do much of anything I needed to do. Thus I was forced to abandon what was the most perfect email program I have ever used. I really miss the old classic Eudora.

I installed Eudora OSE on the new Win7 puter and tried to import the data from the 6.2.5.6 version. Some stuff moved without too much problems. Other stuff like the thousands of contacts in the address books are in shambles. Some data is there but to really make it convert, I pretty much have to type everything over again in the proper slots. Also, some filters work, some don't.

OSE is a lot harder to use than the old Eudora and does not have near the functionality. For example, the Mailboxes window is full of other files and folders that are not mail boxes. To save space and scrolling up and down, how do I get rid of all that stuff that should not be there? I tried using the favorites window but none of the mailboxes will open from that window, only in the all folders or smart folders window will the mail boxes open. This is nonsense. Why take something that was so close to perfect and screw it all up? It makes no sense to me. There are no help files or instructions on how to do anything like the old Eudora had. I am a user not a programmer. I don't want to spend hours and hours and hours trying to figure out how the blasted thing is supposed to work because there are absolutely no instructions that I can find on how to use it! If it is somehow supposed to be intuitive, it is not working for me. I am 62 years old and not overly bright but not totally stupid. But I am not a techie either. I am a user wanting a user friendly product.

I am not looking for a free product. I was more than willing to pay for a great product that worked and I did when I bought the old Eudora, several times over. Now we have a free product that does not work and the product that I paid for that did work is now gone, with no money refunded. What is going on with that? Am I missing something?

Next question would be, is there another email client out there that is as good as the old Eudora was (but better and more user friendly than OSE) that runs on Win7 and will import without problems the old data files from 6.2.5.6?

With an exasperated sigh, thank you. Dave