P .NIKOLIC posted on Fri, 08 Feb 2013 16:56:01 +0000 as excerpted:
> On Fri, 8 Feb 2013 11:26:10 -0500 Gene Heskett <gheskett@xxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
>> On Friday 08 February 2013 11:24:05 P .NIKOLIC did opine:
>> Message additions Copyright Friday 08 February 2013 by Gene Heskett
>>
>>> Claws Mail is every bit as good which is where i am now .
>> I have considered claws, but there seems to be no way to import the
>> kmail message corpus. Thats a show stopper as it goes back over 10
>> years. Thats in the 10Gb range here.
> i seem to remember there is an import utility for Claws mail but not
> sure if it could handle that much mail i have about 1.5Gb here that
> went across ok , Let me dig thru the archive here see if i can spot
> the utility i used ..
It's definitely possible to import mail kmail -> claws-mail. There's
actually several methods I've seen people report having used. However,
there's not a built-in importer, as there is with other clients.
kmail can (could?, I /think/ the akonadified version, where it's actually
akonadi handing it, still does) actually handle two different formats,
mbox and maildir, with the default having changed over the years.
mbox is the simplest, as claws-mail actually has an mbox plugin and can
read it directly if that plugin is used. However, mbox format is all the
mails for a mail-folder lumped into a single massive file, which doesn't
tend to be particularly robust (if the filesystem screws up that
file...), so both kmail and claws-mail discourage its use.
Both the maildir format that kmail uses, and the mh format that claws-
mail uses, are single message per file, with each mail folder an actual
filesystem directory, and as such, *MUCH* more robust (a lost or
corrupted file is just that one message gone). However, the filenaming
is different, and maildir uses subdirs for new messages, etc, that mh
doesn't have, so they're not directly compatible and a converter/importer
of SOME sort must be used.
On the claws-mail web site (linked from the help system inside claws,
among other places), there's a whole "Tools" section devoted to user-
submitted helper scripts. One of these is a kmail/maildir importer
script (kmail-mailbox2claws-mail.pl), written in perl. That's actually
the method I used, altho the perl script itself is about a decade old
(well, last modification of the on-site version was 2007, it says) and I
had to modify it slightly to get it to run with current perl. I don't
claim to know perl and have forgotten the details, but the errors it spit
out were easy enough to figure out and fix, for someone reasonably
comfortable with ANY kind of scripting (I'm reasonably good with bash).
Once I had done that, however, it worked fine, converting all my kmail
maildirs.
Another method I've seen people post that they used successfully, is a
temporary installation of mutt, which can understand and convert between
maildir and mh format. This should work very well for people who have
some mutt experience already, since they won't have to read so much of
its documentation just to figure out how to do the convert, then uninstall
it again. For those who have never used mutt, this method would be
rather more difficult.
The third method I've seen mentioned works well for those who already
have access to an IMAP server. Basically, they simply upload everything
to the IMAP server in kmail, then access it (either redownloading it or
direct from the IMAP server) from claws-mail. One guy even mentioned
locally installing and configuring dovecot, an IMAP server, just long
enough to do this. Once he had everything back in local (non-IMAP) claws-
mail, he deleted the claws-mail IMAP accounts, and shut down and
uninstalled dovecot once again.
So there's at least three different methods to get kmail's maildir
mailboxes into claws-mail, in addition to the mbox plugin that can be
used for that. All three of the methods are a bit fiddly if you haven't
any experience with any of them, but given the quite wide coverage of the
three, many people will find at least one of the three methods reasonably
easy.
For you specifically, Gene, given that I know you know scripting well
enough to have already done some custom scripting with kmail, I'd guess
you'll have little trouble with the perl script that I used, even if you
do need to modify it a bit, as I did. That's assuming you don't have
mutt experience and/or IMAP access and/or dovecot (or whatever)
experience, and with your background, I'd not be surprised if you had at
least one of those covered those as well, thus giving you your pick of
methods. =:^)
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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