akonadi / kmail / gmail

[dep]

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.