said Duncan: | dep posted on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 16:30:17 +0000 as excerpted: | > this leaves claws. and, finally, my question: is there any utility | > that will import kmail mailboxen into claws? or to a format that claws | > can then import? as noted, i have 20 years of email archives and would | > like to be able to get to them without bringing up a different | > application, i.e. kmail | > | > so . . . any import filters, either built-in or third-party? | | Yes. Actually, importing years (nearly a decade on kmail, with | imports from MSOE into kmail from before that) of local mail archives | into claws- mail was one of my major kmail -> claws-mail switch issues | as well, but there are tools that can do it. | | Note that various versions of kmail have supported and/or defaulted | to two different formats, maildir and mbox. Claws has a plugin | (mailMBOX) that handles mbox so AFAIK if that's what your kmail is | using, you should= | be able to simply use that plugin and not have to do any conversion. | However, the mbox format puts all mails within a single "folder" into | the= | same file, thus eliminating some of the scriptability options you | have with mh-format, and, because there's multiple mails in one file, | it's also a bit less robust as damage to a single file risks the | entire folder's worth of messages. | | So I was using maildir as I knew its file-per-message format was more | robust, and AFAIK, that's all newer kmail supports -- I don't believe | it supports actually working with mbox any longer except to convert | it -- tho I could be wrong. | | Anyway, there are at least two and likely three methods available to | convert maildir to mh-dir format. | | * While this reminder shouldn't be necessary, just in case... Please | copy/backup your existing mail archive before trying any conversion, | just= | in case it doesn't go as expected. Most conversion tools will treat | the source as read-only and put the conversion in a new location, but | it's definitely a lot less stressful to know you have a backup if | something goes wrong! | | 1) I used the conversion script method, tho honestly it might require | a bit more technical skill than some people have, because... | | At the claws-mail website there's a page of third-party contributed | tools, including several scripts that convert mailboxes from various | formats to claws-native mh-dir format. | | https://www.claws-mail.org/tools.php | | IIRC I used the kmail-mailbox2claws-mail.pl perl script. However, | it's about a decade old and designed to work with an older perl. | When I ran it with my then-current perl, at first it errored out. | However, while I'm definitely /not/ a perl hacker, with a bit of | patient hacking the script based on what the errors said, I was able | to get it to work within= | a few hours, and it did the conversion quite well. | | 2) The console-based email program mutt supports both maildir and | mh-dir formats, and apparently has a converter that lets you convert | between them. A number of people have reported that they were able | to install it= | temporarily, and use its converter to convert from kmail's maildir to | claws-mail's mh-dir format. While I used the script method above, I | believe this method will be easier for most, and if I were doing it | over again I believe I'd try this way first. | | 3) There are additional scripts available for converting mbox or | tbird's format (whatever it is) to mh-dir, and as I said, claws has a | plugin that= | handles mbox directly as well. It's thus likely to be possible to do | a two-stage conversion as well, using some other mail client | conversion utility to convert first to the mbox standard or to | tbird's format, then either using the mbox directly with claws' | mailMBOX plugin, or using one of the mbox to mh-dir conversion | scripts from the claws tools page to do the final conversion. Thanks very much -- thast's all really useful information. I d/led and installed Claws yesterday and almost immediately hit a bump: the ProtonMail Bridge among other things assigns nonstandard ports and its IMAP seems different from the IMAP4 specified by Claws. Which will require some serious digging to fix, I fear. But it all seems well worth doing -- particularly in converting my mailboxen to a more universal format. Applications come and go, but data are forever, unless we make it inaccessible. -- dep Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email. Because privacy matters.