Eudora mailboxes converter for PowerMail 3


Last Software update: 18/4/2000.
Author: Brice Dardel. Visit my personal web pages if you want informations about me.

No support is provided for this software, but you can always drop me an email at: ML-Brice@ifrance.com I will try to answer if I have time.


If you use this software...

This Emailer Eudora mailboxes to PowerMail converter is free. Just buy your PowerMail licence to encourage the development of future versions of PowerMail! A big thanks to the PowerMail team for such a great product!

Where to download?

Download version 1.1 here (1.8MB MacBinary Stuffit file). It is a standalone application that needs a PowerPC but nothing else installed (it is does not fill your system folder, just drag'n'drop, like PowerMail :-) ).

The last version of this page should be located here.

Main change of version 1.1 (18/4/2000): The mail sent by your Emailer software are now imported with the correct date (this is because the header of the Eudora exported mailboxes do not contain the "Date:" parameter, but the date on the separator line. Now the application extracts it and put it back as it should be, with a "Date:" in the mail header).

Why this software?

I wanted to convert my thousands of Emailer mails to PowerMail and the built-in PowerMail import Emailer feature was estimating 20 hours, then 30... after a few hours, it was estimated to end in 180 hours (...). It gave up after 8 hours by crashing PowerMail :-( [yes Emailer was the frontmost application and both application and the system had plenty of extra RAM. I did it twice, on a G3/266 and a G3/400].

So the solution was to export the mailboxes in Eudora format from Emailer using AppleScript as noted on PowerMail FAQ. However there are a few problems while importing mails from Eudora to PowerMail because Emailer exported mailboxes are not perfectly compatible with what PowerMail expects.

What does the software do exactly?

It reads Eudora maiboxes and convert them (to a new location) to be more compatible with PowerMail's import capabilities.

Here are a few things done by the software:
- Accents will be imported correctly.
- If you had bad accents in your original mail, some will be corrected!!
- Dates will be imported correctly (especially the mails received from an Emailer 1.1 french edition user, the date was in French in the header!).
- No empty mail will be created by PowerMail.
- Mails will not be broken into 2 parts if a empty line is present in the headers.
- PowerMail does not import all the "To" and "CC" if too many are on the same line, I break them on multiple lines so PowerMail import them all correctly.

How to use it?

There are two folders in the same directory as the main application:
- Eudora Mailboxes (old)
- Eudora Mailboxes (new)

Preliminary step: you need to export your Claris Emailer mails to Eudora mailboxes using the appropriate AppleScript. Note that your do not need to have Eudora installed for all the steps to be done properly.

At the first launch, or when you move the application, it asks you where is the data file. Just select "Eudora To PowerMail.data" which is located beside the application. If you do not find it, just click "New" to create a new data file, it is not used anyway (just here because of 4D).

1. Put all your mailboxes into the folder "Eudora Mailboxes (old)".
2. Launch the application "Eudora To PowerMail", click OK in the dialog.
3. Wait until it is done. The number of messages processed is written in a window. All the files in the directory will be processed, and also all the subfolders in the directory.
4. When it finished, all the mailboxes in the "Eudora Mailboxes (new)" folder are ready to be imported into PowerMail. Note that you can tell PowerMail to import all the mailboxes in the "Eudora Mailboxes (new)" folder in just a few clics (be sure to use that feature, not to have to do each mailboxes one by one).

Why is this done in 4D?

It is mainly because I do not have time to write a application in a C++ framework for this (because of the current work load, I am a engineer student). It works great like that, the main problem is that the binary is quite large for what it is, and that because I do not use at all the database facilities of 4D, the data file is of no use.

Limitation of this version

The progress window is not updated correctly when it needs to be redrawn (I mean not updated at all ;) ).
Interface is crap.