[TriLUG] pine -> thunderbird transition

Scott G. Hall ScottGHall at BellSouth.Net
Wed Mar 9 16:20:15 EST 2005


On 8-Mar-2005 15:13 EST, Andrew Perrin wrote:
> Any advice on transitioning from Pine to thunderbird? Specifically, I
> have lots of mailboxes ni pine format, and would like to either migrate
> them or just have t-bird be able to see them as mailboxes directly. But
> pointing the "Local Folders" directory at the pine mail directory
> doesn't do anything.

The difference is file structure.  Pine uses the "maildir" format (feel
free to correct me if I'm wrong), and Thunderbird uses the "mbox" format,
but with subdirectories named with a .sbd extension.

The "mbox" format is the old UNIX mailbox format, where the file is
considered a folder, and contains a stack of RFC-822 messages separated
by a "From sender date-munge" line, the same at that used by the old UNIX
'mail' command and user mailboxes created by sendmail.

There are some tools to convert from one to the other, though I have no
experience running any.  Qmail is supposed to ship with 'maildir2mbox',
so you can look for that on the Internet.  Here is one solution:
http://www.systemsaligned.com/Learning_Centre/OSS_Projects/Maildir_to_mbox_Conversion_Utility/61/
Look at this for more info:
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/infosys/mail/qmail/qmail-manual-html/misc/INSTALL.mbox.html

Also there is "MailAvenger" with the 'mailexec' utility:
http://www.mailavenger.org/mailexec.html

A look at the FAQ pages at the Univ. of Washington (the creators of PINE)
suggests installing UW-imapd to deliver up your Pine-created files to any
IMAP compatible program, and not to try to convert them directly yourself:
http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/sysadmins.html , section 11.2

-- 
Scott G. Hall
Raleigh, NC, USA
ScottGHall at BellSouth.Net



More information about the TriLUG mailing list