Importing mbox into Thunderbird?
I'm beginning to like Thunderbird. It replaces fetchmail, procmail, sendmail, mutt, and vim for mailing. I miss vim, though. Now, the question on hand... I have lots of "mbox" format files of old emails. How do I import into Thunderbird? Online talks about "Import MBOX file" under "Tools". But, mine (68.12.0) don't have such entry.
I have been sitting on this question for ages, because I have had similar problems (long ago now) when I was moving between email clients. I don't have my fingertips on a solution, if one is still needed, but here are two approaches that might work: 1. Stand up a mailserver (there are some very simple ones), and use that to import your mail into Thunderbird. This may require converting your mbox file into something else, but this is an old problem that has established tools. 2. Figure out what format Thuderbird wants to store mail in, convert that, and move it into the expected place for mail in the filesystem. This may require rebuilding an index for your mailbox, but the last time I used Thunderbird it wasn't hard to do that. Good luck! On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 at 13:52, William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
I'm beginning to like Thunderbird. It replaces fetchmail, procmail, sendmail, mutt, and vim for mailing. I miss vim, though.
Now, the question on hand... I have lots of "mbox" format files of old emails. How do I import into Thunderbird? Online talks about "Import MBOX file" under "Tools". But, mine (68.12.0) don't have such entry. --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
| From: William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2021 13:52:21 -0500 | I'm beginning to like Thunderbird. It replaces fetchmail, procmail, sendmail, | mutt, and vim for mailing. I miss vim, though. I'm interested in improving my email routines. I spend a lot of time with email so any improvement would be useful. So: what do you use? Why? Here's my answer. It is not a recommendationo. Most of us in this household use Alpine. Thats a venerable text-based-GUI mail user agent. I've been using Pine/Alpine since the early 1990s (when I switched from Berkeley mail (like mailx on Linux)). As you can tell, I'm quite conservative. I used to say that I changed MUAs every decade, but I'm behind now. Why do I like and stay with Pine? - inertia - modest subset of EMACS keystrokes - stable but well-maintained - works well through SSH - I'm very comfortable with it - has most features that I know that I want. - Alpine does not hold my mail hostage: ordinary UNIX text tools can get at it. (Alpine supports various formats but I use mbox.) Molly (my wife) uses Thunderbird. - she's used to WIMP GUIs - she does not use any advanced features - dislikes and avoids updates Thunderbird: - seems attractive - was busted by a Ubuntu update that I had to diagnose and back out of. I pinned the version of Thunderbird and the library at fault. Nothing said by Ubuntu folks convinces me that it is safe to unpin (archived mail is very important). - I don't know how to export the Thunderbird mail archives (but I haven't put my mind to the problem) - future looks precarious. Mozilla seems to have cut the Thunderbird project loose GMail: - seems to be taking over the world - I'm sometimes forced to use it. - runs well on smart phones - someone else does the maintenance - But: I want control over my mail. I don't want it in the cloud. I don't want it to go through Google's hands (we run our own mailserver). - I want painless offline access to mail archives
"D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> writes:
I'm interested in improving my email routines. I spend a lot of time with email so any improvement would be useful.
So: what do you use? Why?
I have two Lappys plus a Desktop all running Gnu-Linux, an IPhone and a Mac which runs Apple OS plus a Smart Watch running Android. GNUS is my main email workhorse with sendmail and fetchmail and runs on two linux boxes whilst an old Dell Vostro Lappy is used solely as a Radio Tranceiver and has only an Opera Browser installed in addition to the Radio requirements. The desktop is my Video Box with a wide CRT and is used for nothing else. Gnus is set up and fetchmail/RSS are configured to bring only vid related mail. A Lenovo is my main Box and it handles the bulk of my email traffic. The free Smtp2Go server handles all outbound mail from my Gnu-Linux machines. Why GNUS? Because I have always used it and have no reason to change but I also have ThunderBird configured as a so far unused backup on my main box. Apple mail resides on an IPhone and a Mac box and so do two gmail accounts that I have. Basically the main gmail account is never used for mail but only as access to the Google suite of applications. The only mail it handles is the occasional inbound Google blurb. A secondary gmail account is a "throw away" used for all the sites I have occasion to use for info, etc and which invariably demand an email address before granting access. The Apple Mail account is never used for mail but I have it because it is compulsory and similarly it collects any Apple blurbs. The Smart Watch is never used for mail or in fact anything and I consider it a waste of the $10 I paid for it to a Chinese merchant plus the $10 SIM Card from 7/11 although admittedly it does work perfectly. -- William Henderson aka Slackrat http://billh.sdf.org/slackware.jpg 9HS5203 ON HamSphere Ham Radio
On 2021-03-21 11:57 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| From: William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2021 13:52:21 -0500
| I'm beginning to like Thunderbird. It replaces fetchmail, procmail, sendmail, | mutt, and vim for mailing. I miss vim, though.
I'm interested in improving my email routines. I spend a lot of time with email so any improvement would be useful.
So: what do you use? Why?
I've been using Thunderbird for the last 20+ years. Its been long enough that I don't remember when I started using it. Probably not that long after it became available as I had been using Firefox as my main web browser back then. It has been trained on lots of spam and automatically filters out most of my junk email along with the filtering rules I have give it. It sorts my email messages into one of my hundred plus folders. The messages for a given folder are stored in mbox format. In a pinch you could use other programs that understand the format to read the saved messages. There were some hiccups on occasion after some updates but I haven't had a problem with it in some time. It mostly just works. There is one long standing quirk re: undeleting deleted messages. It may not undelete the message, or if you deleted several, it tends to recover the message deleted prior to the most recent one. No big deal as the deleted one you really wanted to get back will be in the Trash folder. -- Cheers! Kevin. http://www.ve3syb.ca/ | "Nerds make the shiny things that https://www.patreon.com/KevinCozens | distract the mouth-breathers, and | that's why we're powerful" Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172 | #include <disclaimer/favourite> | --Chris Hardwick
On Sun, 21 Mar 2021 at 11:57, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| From: William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2021 13:52:21 -0500
| I'm beginning to like Thunderbird. It replaces fetchmail, procmail, sendmail, | mutt, and vim for mailing. I miss vim, though.
I'm interested in improving my email routines. I spend a lot of time with email so any improvement would be useful.
So: what do you use? Why?
Here's my answer. It is not a recommendationo.
Most of us in this household use Alpine. Thats a venerable text-based-GUI mail user agent. I've been using Pine/Alpine since the early 1990s (when I switched from Berkeley mail (like mailx on Linux)). As you can tell, I'm quite conservative. I used to say that I changed MUAs every decade, but I'm behind now.
Why do I like and stay with Pine? - inertia - modest subset of EMACS keystrokes - stable but well-maintained - works well through SSH - I'm very comfortable with it - has most features that I know that I want. - Alpine does not hold my mail hostage: ordinary UNIX text tools can get at it. (Alpine supports various formats but I use mbox.)
Molly (my wife) uses Thunderbird. - she's used to WIMP GUIs - she does not use any advanced features - dislikes and avoids updates
Thunderbird:
- seems attractive
- was busted by a Ubuntu update that I had to diagnose and back out of. I pinned the version of Thunderbird and the library at fault. Nothing said by Ubuntu folks convinces me that it is safe to unpin (archived mail is very important).
- I don't know how to export the Thunderbird mail archives (but I haven't put my mind to the problem)
- future looks precarious. Mozilla seems to have cut the Thunderbird project loose
GMail:
- seems to be taking over the world
- I'm sometimes forced to use it.
- runs well on smart phones
- someone else does the maintenance
- But: I want control over my mail. I don't want it in the cloud. I don't want it to go through Google's hands (we run our own mailserver).
- I want painless offline access to mail archives--- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
I have two primary email accounts, one at Gmail and one at Protonmail (Protonmail has free accounts: I like them enough that I'm paying for their account, although on usability Gmail is definitely better ...). I was intending to move entirely to Protonmail, I seem to have stalled on that. I have Thunderbird set up at home, primarily as a way to back up Gmail and Protonmail to my hard drive: it's rare that I use Thunderbird as a client, but it's always worked fine when I do. Protonmail, because of its encryption, requires a special "bridge" software to allow local clients to access their mail server. It's a lousy arrangement, but does seem to work - and I bought into their service in part because of that encryption. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com
On Sun, 21 Mar 2021 11:57:09 -0400 (EDT) "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Most of us in this household use Alpine. Thats a venerable text-based-GUI mail user agent. I've been using Pine/Alpine since the early 1990s (when I switched from Berkeley mail (like mailx on Linux)). As you can tell, I'm quite conservative. I used to say that I changed MUAs every decade, but I'm behind now.
Hugh, I have been running Sylpheed since 2003. At the time, I was looking for a mail reader that would work offline. This allowed me to read email while sitting at the landromat, disconnected from the internet. In this day of wifi, this is still a useful feature. The time comes when you should reply to the email, hit send-later, and read it through the next day, and possibly edit it, before sending it (or not). Sylpheed is a plain-text email program, which I generally like. Are there any security issues reading rich text and HTML stuff in Thunderbird? Sylpheed has some ability to manage HTML and URLs, and I can pass the email to Firefox. The primary issue I have with Sylpheed is that it uses mail handler (mh) email format. Maybe you like mh! Prior to Sylpheed, I used various mbox email programs like Pine, Balsa kmail, Netscape and some others. I would create symbolic links so that each email program would see the same inbox and archive files. The address books were separate. The only other problem I had was that Netscape did not delete emails. It flipped over some tag which hid the thing from Netscape. The other email programs still saw them. How does Thunderbird behave? -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca jhowardgibson@gmail.com http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
On 2021-03-21 11:57 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
So: what do you use? Why?
Thunderbird. Because it's like Netscape Communicator. Indeed, some of my mail archives (and one of my mail accounts) date back to Communicator, and it's fairly seamlessly managed updates since ~1998, going from Linux → Solaris → Windows → Linux → Mac OS → Linux over those years. I may have so many legacy settings hanging about that Thunderbird may not be working as well as it could. Maybe one sunny day I'll do a full reinstall, but that would take a while. What I dislike: Like all Mozilla products used to (I think Firefox Quantum stopped doing this), Thunderbird uses its own font settings. For some reason, they're set to "extra ugly" on this machine, and I can't seem to back out of that. The display looks much prettier on RealVNC on a Raspberry Pi via an ssh tunnel from my desktop than it does on the desktop itself. Oh fontconfig we love you get up …
Thunderbird:
- was busted by a Ubuntu update that I had to diagnose and back out of. I pinned the version of Thunderbird and the library at fault.
Since Thunderbird is effectively a browser, I'd maybe not pin it.
- I don't know how to export the Thunderbird mail archives (but I haven't put my mind to the problem)
They're mbox too. A bit of a pain on the backups, but plain text, can't go wrong. There was always going to be an option to switch to maildir (or whatever you call a folder full of individual message files) but I don't think it ever got implemented as a core Thunderbird feature. There's a messy way of doing it through plugins, but I don't want that.
- future looks precarious. Mozilla seems to have cut the Thunderbird project loose
ehh, it's no more or less supported than most other open source projects. I want to add: 1.) I don't run my own mail server, for the same reason I don't live off-grid: I don't want to understand and repair the intricacies of a byzantine system unless someone's paying me to do so. I once saw a sendmail.cf file in the late 1990s and it took me months to recover. MX records — they are something to do with the Nortec Collective¹ out of Tijuana, right? 2.) All MUAs that are not Outlook on Windows 10 are doing it wrong. I'm not saying that MS Outlook is perfect — it's a very particularly radioactive dumpster fire — but unless you use it to send mail, you'll be forever “That Guy that sends the weird-lookin’ emails” to most of the world. cheers, Stewart %%% ¹: I recommend their music highly, if techno infused with heavy Banda-style oompah bass works as much for you as it does for me.
participants (8)
-
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Giles Orr -
Howard Gibson -
Kevin Cozens -
Slackrat -
Stewart C. Russell -
William Park -
William Witteman