Nesta wrote originally, <Can I get some opinions here please. I'm making a move and would like to know what others use and why. Thanks!>
Well, I'm still coming to you from Claris Emailer 2.0 v2, but I've been having issues with it the last couple months which are finally getting on my nerves/scaring me enough to start getting semi-serious about making a move too, and admittedly now, I feel backed into a corner. If not for these problems, I'd be happy to keep CE for the rest of my computer life. I've been using it since 1996. Not only did it always run like a charm (until recently), but I save the majority of my email correspondence for both reference (there's a lot of "important information" in there) and entertainment (sometimes I enjoy reading back on old social correspondences). So I was refusing to switch because all my saved "Old Stuff" (which is, after 13 years, into tens of thousands of emails) would be lost/inaccessible or very hard to get back into -- as long as I stayed with CE it was easy as pie to get back into anything I need or want to, as well as continue picking up/responding to and continuing to "collect" necessary emails. However, on acccount of my recent issues, I can no longer recommend CE to "new" users (unless they're exclusively on OS's 7.x.x through 9.x.x but even I'M on OS X now, so that doesn't seem likely!). However, I always loved CE because of its "KISS" streamlined organization and ease-of-use, combined with what seemed to be "powerful" features (Mail Actions, nesting folders, choice of encoding, ability to easily move it back and forth between my G4 and iBook). I'm truly dismayed by the idea of "having to" switch now. About this time last year, I had a minor problem with CE (related to my use of it in Tiger under Classic: I never had any issues with it pre-OS X), which caused me to try Mail.app and Thunderbird -- not "for real" but to set them up and do a few test emails/brief correspondence with the Claris Emailer list in order to fix the problem (I've been running CE under Tiger in Classic since I got the G4). I got it solved and went happily back to using, and continuing to recommend, CE. However, 2-3 months ago I ran into something 'new' which the sugggestions from CE Listers didn't help me with -- I'm not able to use CE on the iBook anymore -- it won't open even -- and about a week and a half ago, the same problem cropped up on the G4 and worse (the only reason why it apparently seems to be running at all anymore is from my initial abortive attempt about two weeks ago to import my CE mail into Mail.app, but more to come on that). It will only run from my BACKUP on the external HD now, no longer from the installation on the "regular" internal HD from where I want it to run! :-O This is virtually untenable, and it's what's driving me up the wall and into "oh no I gotta switch mode" now. Now I suppose if I was willing to let all my Old Emails "go," I could just go ahead and start using Mail.app or Thunderbird and be done with it......but I can't just do that. In my initial brief tryouts of Mail.app and Thunderbird, I preferred Thunderbird -- Mail.app reminded me too much of MicroBorg Outlook, which at the time I was using and hating on the Windoze PC at work, but Thunderbird had more of a CE look-and-feel. I also liked the fact that Thunderbird is open source, so if I used that I could get out of the email proprietary environment, so if I ever have to switch again in the future, maybe it wouldn't be such a big deal. Also my boyfriend uses Thunderbird on his Mac and he totally loves it. (But no, his "pack rat" syndrome, which covers everything ELSE, does not extend to email, so he never had the "mail migration problem" I now face.) So I pick back up on this idea of switching email clients, but find out Thunderbird won't import mail from CE, though Mail.app will. It originally (last year) seemed to APPEAR that Thunderbird would import mail from Mail.app, so I was going to import to the CE stuff into Mail.app, then from Mail.app to Thunderbird. I actually started this project a couple weeks ago, but I had issues with the import into Mail.app and decided to keep using my "crippled" CE anyway, until yesterday (which is also the timing in which Nesta writes about email clients!). Well yesterday I got the idea that if I import only ONE CE "mailbox" at a time (originally I'd tried to do it all at once on an overnight, and as I mentioned, my CE mail is quite extensive), maybe Mail.app will suck it all in correctly and not "hang up" on me like it was doing. It seemed to be doing OK until I got to a particular mailbox (which has 20,000+ emails in it) at about 8 PM last night. I left it to run overnight when I got tired and noted it wasn't finished yet, but this morning when it was "finished," only 14,000-something of the emails had imported. :-O In the meantime, yesterday afternoon while proceeding with the Mail.app imports, I also discovered the disturbing fact that no, Thunderbird will not import from my Mail.app, and some Googling revealed the fact that Mail.app under Tiger has a different "mbox" structure as compared to pre-Tiger, and I'll have to convert the Mail.app imported email to make Thunderbird take it. It seemed so overwhelmingly complicated (the more I read, the more confused I got, and I was reading for a couple of hours while I proceeded with Mail.app imports) -- I decided to nix Thunderbird.....I continued with my one-emailbox-at-a-time imports, and decided to read up on Mail.app in my Tiger: The Missing Manual book. Most of the stuff I'm reading about it, I find I actually like -- in spite of the Outlook taste it had when I first tried it, Mail.app does all the stuff CE does (CE was just "ahead of its time"), and most of it in the same or similar ways. So I think, once I get my CE mails all imported, I'll start using Mail.app. I'm a little bummed I won't break out of the Proprietary box on email, but I remind myself, I've been in that very same box with CE for the past 13 years anyway. And Mail.app is right here "for free" since it came with Tiger, and because it's newer than CE and Tiger-native, I won't run aground with it in the same ways I'm running aground with CE now. But I've seen plenty of people having Mail.app problems on this list over the years, and now I myself just had a problem with one of my most important (if not THE most important!) CE mailboxes not importing in full (the one I mentioned with 20,000-something emails), so I'm feeling apprehensive at best. So I ask you G-Listers: 1. Is Mail.app REALLY actually any good for an Email Pack Rat like me? 2. If I try to import that Big Email Box again, what can I do to make sure the whole thing takes? 3. Curiously, have any of you imported from Mail.app to Thunderbird with that conversion thing? If so, did you have an easy time with it and are you happy with Thunderbird? 4. Are there other open source email clients into which I can import directly from CE? Thank you in advance for your insight and suggestions. ~Yersinia. ________ "It's only premarital sex if you're going to get married." --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. 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