PocoMail to Thunderbird

[Taufan Zimmer]

Hello,
I have just found a clean way to migrate all e-mails from PocoMail to
Thunderbird.
Usualy you would export all your mailboxes from PocoMail into another format
like Eudora and then import them one by one into Thunderbird. That works, good,
but not without downsides. First, you have to that procedure for every single
mailbox from PocoMail, export into Eudora and in Thunderbird, import from
Eudora. One by one. Very tedious especially if you have large archieve of
emails like me with hundreds of subfolders and mailboxes.
Secondly, any special ASCII character, e.g. the german umlauts, will not get
imported rightly into Thunderbird (displaying "=FC" for "ü" or "=F6" for "ö"
etc.).
And lastly, emails with attachments (multipart message in MIME format) imported
from PocoMail displays incorrectly in Thunderbird. Thunderbird will just
display the whole MIME binary characters without recognizing them being an
attachment. I haven't found out how to fix that from within Thunderbird.

But before I crack my head with that, I've found another way to import all
e-mails from PocoMail to Thunderbird without all the downsides described above.

Here is a step by step explanation:

- start Thunderbird.
- Under your "Local Folders" create a new folder e.g. "POCOIMPORT"
- exit Thunderbird

- In explorer go to the profile folder of Thunderbird (e.g.
d:\Progs\Thunderbird\profile\)
Note: I use "Portable Thunderbird" by John Haller
http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_thunderbird/
The standard version of Thunderbird puts it's profile folder somewhere deep
down in C:\Documents and Settings\. Stupid.

- In your Thunderbird profile folder open the folder "Mail" and then "Local
Folders"
There you will see your newly created folder e.g. "POCOIMPORT.sbd" with ".sbd"
as extension ("sbd" is a Netscape standard for any subfolder and stands for
"sub directory" I think)

- now go to your PocoMail folder

- open the "Mail" folder of PocoMail (e.g. d:\Progs\PocoMail\Mail\)

- copy every *.mbx file from PocoMail into the "POCOIMPORT.sbd" folder of
Thunderbird. You can use command line xcopy for this e.g.
xcopy /e *.mbx "d:\Progs\Thundebird\profile\Mail\Local Folders\POCOIMPORT.sbd\"
This will copy every .mbx file of PocoMail along with all subfolders into your
specified folder in Thunderbird.
Note: don't forget the double quote around the target path and the "/e" param
of xcopy.

- Return to the profile folder of Thunderbird.
In the "POCOIMPORT.sbd" folder you will now find all your .mbx files along with
all subfolders of your PocoMail\Mail folder.

- Now for every subfolder which you just imported you have to add the extension
".sbd", e.g. "My Business Mails" into "My Business Mails.sbd" and so on.
Note: every single subfolder!!

- After that you have to remove the .mbx extensions of all your imported ".mbx"
files, e.g. "Sent.mbx" into "Sent" (without extension), in all subfolders.
you can use a dos command to do this:
for /f "delims=" %i in ('dir /b /s *.mbx') do ren "%i" "%~ni"
This will search for all *.mbx recursively and rename them into their name
without extension.
Note: if you open a command console don't forget to change directory first into
the right folder i.e. "POCOIMPORT.sbd"

Now go open your Thunderbird and voila! All your e-mails from PocoMail can be
found under the POCOIMPORT folder along with the right encoding and all
attachments really recognized as attachments.

Note for users of PocoMail prior to version 3.0:
you have to go one step further. In order to access a subfolder in your
imported mails in Thunderbird you have to create an empty file with the name of
the folder, e.g. for the folder "My Business Mails.sbd" you have to create a
empty file named "My Business Mails" in the same folder where that folder is
located.
Again you can do this by a dos command:
for /f "delims=" %i in ('dir /b /s /a:d *.sbd') do if not exist "%~pni" echo
on>"%~pni"
This will search for any subdirectory named *.sbd recursively (dir /b /s /a:d
*.sbd) and for every directory it returns it will check if a file exist with
that name (%~pni --> "~p" for path, "~n" for the name without extension, "%i"
the variable from the dir command) and if not it will create it (echo on >
filename).

Or alternatively, you can just create a folder with the same name from within
Thunderbird. Just start Thunderbird, right click on the folder where your
subfolder should have been, choose "new folder", and give exactly the same name
as your missing subfolder. Just after that, Thunderbird will internally find
out that that folder already exists in real life and will populate it with your
existing emails. Now repeat for every single subfolder you're missing.

I hope this explanation can help some PocoMail users with migrating from
PocoMail to Thunderbird in one or another way, sometime, i hope.

Greetings,
Taufan

--
"Es gibt gar viel Dummes in den Satzungen der Kirche. Aber sie will herrschen,
und da muß sie eine bornierte Masse haben, die sich duckt und die geneigt ist,
sich beherrschen zu lassen."
Johann Wolfgang Goethe

[Brian]

Taufan Zimmer wrote:
> Hello,
> I have just found a clean way to migrate all e-mails from PocoMail to
> Thunderbird.

<snip>
Where were you a couple of months ago?? I had to download ewwdora,
create profile, export, import, export, etc..
;)

[F]

Taufan Zimmer wrote:

[snip]

> I hope this explanation can help some PocoMail users with migrating from
> PocoMail to Thunderbird in one or another way, sometime, i hope.

No problems (other than attachments not being transferred) with Eudora
to Thunderbird.

Saved hours of trying to work out why the automated transfer simply
filled 46GB of spare space on my hard drive before grinding to a halt...

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

--
F
(Beware of negative spam trap)

[F]

F wrote:

> No problems (other than attachments not being transferred) with Eudora
> to Thunderbird.

Spoke too soon.

Some transferred emails are blank - no body.

--
F

[Taufan Zimmer]

F wrote:
> Some transferred emails are blank - no body.

The mailbox format (mbx) are basically plain text files which can be opened and
edited using normal text editors e.g. Notepad. So maybe you can try this: exit
Thundebird, open the mailbox which contains the faulty message with text editor
(note: Thunderbird mailbox file names don't have an extension). Try to find
your erroneus message. Compare it to other messages in the mailbox, look what's
different or what might be causing it to behave like that (e.g. not showing the
body). Edit it. Then open Thunderbird and view it again.
But better make backup first of the mailbox file.

Greetings,
Taufan

[Neil]

Taufan Zimmer wrote:

> for /f "delims=" %i in ('dir /b /s *.mbx') do ren "%i" "%~ni"

for /r %i in (*.mbx) do ren "%i" "%~ni"

> for /f "delims=" %i in ('dir /b /s /a:d *.sbd') do if not exist
> "%~pni" echo on>"%~pni"

for /r /d %i in (*.sbd) ...

--
Warning: May contain traces of nuts.

[caster...@gmail.com]

Using Pocomail Converter, you can easily convert your Pocomail messages into Thunderbird.

Follow the link at : http://www.softspire.com/pocomail-converter/

Direct Download Link : http://download.cnet.com/SoftSpire-Pocomail-Converter/3000-2369_4-76285968.html