Bye, Bye TBird
I know I’m going to get serious flack from my buddy Larry on this… I switched to Apple mail tonight - from Thunderbird, I think that’s officially my 4th email client in 6 years, eat time moving several 100,000 emails each time - it’s been VERY painful, and time consuming, and stressful.
So the question I’m sure your asking is why?, well the answer is pretty simple - Thunderbird is a pig, a slow, quirky and not very enjoyable to use pig - but those aren’t the real reason - more and more of the apps that I use and depend on are natively integrating with mail and ical (and the like) and I finally decided to take the plunge - and really it wasn’t much of a plunge really - on my 24”MacIntel Imac - mail.app screams - smart folders behave just like real folders, last time I tried mail.app those smart folders where anything but snappy. Spotlight support in my email is an interesting experience..not FAST FAST, but easily Thunderbird Fast.
The transition of 7.8 GB of mail (yes you read that correctly) from thunderbird to mail.app went smooth as silk, a few lesson learned that may help people in a similar position.
Don’t attempt to use mail.apps native import unless you’re importing minimal mail in a very simple folder structure - it takes forever and it eventually hangs.
If possible Compact all your mail
Backup your Mail or import a copy (duh I know, but it needed to be said)
Ultimately I got a bit lucky, I found a little freeware app that converted my mail BRILLIANTLY
I found Eudora Mailbox Cleaner quite by accident - and it did the job in just under 2 hours - opened my mail ran the secondary script that rebuilt mail.app’s mailboxes one by one and bam! done - dates, states and attachments intact! It’s a beautiful thing!
Addendum: I should also mention that I’ve been using a bayesian spam filter add-on for about 4 years - it works externally from either Thunderbird OR mail.app so I switched with little concern for retraining spam filters - my current spam-filter accuracy is 94.6%.
Hey - I’m flack-free here. Seriously.
Who am I to call a mail.app ab/user? I’d still keep with Eudora 6 under OS9 if I could, but you already knew that.
Eudora 8 - I’m tellin’ ya. It’ll be worth the wait :-)
Still, running Eudora 6.2.4 under OSX (Intel and g5) is OK. I have a bit over 3/4 of a million emails. Eudora rips the attachments out as separate files, so my mail is tiny by comparison - just under 500mb. But the big winner for me has always been “search”. I can still search through 15 years of email and get results back in seconds. SECONDS!
Eudora 8. Just wait.