On 8/7/07, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Anybody know how to export/import settings from one Thunderbird > installation to the next?
Email frustrates me. Supporting email frustrates me. Supporting my own email frustrates me because I can't make head nor tails of what's going on with mail on the filesystem. My favorite setup ever was fetchmail downloading POP mail to /var/spool/mail and then my email program getting it from there... No wait. My *favorite* was using Eudora on Windows. Eudora was perfect in (almost) every way. But it's not available for Linux. But all of that aside, I wish I wish I wish email was stored in a very basic very standard way that was highly portable. I know that mbox and maildir are supposed to be standard, and maildir is all the rage these days among that crowd. But even with those, my mail program keeps adding little bits of extra crap to those files. Eudora supposedly used mbox, but added crap. Evolution adds crap. Thunderbird, my current email program, adds crap. And just trying to find the mail with Thunderbird??? ~/.thunderbird/somekindofretardedrandom.default/Mail And then you have to deal with "Local Folders" versus a folder with the server name. Why oh why can't I have a standard folder (~/.mail or the like) and a standard format (straight maildir)? All that mail I saved from my Eudora days six and seven years ago? I've tried merging it into mail-program-of-the-moment. It never seems to work. Everybody says it can be done, and there are even programs that do converting (emailchemy is one I remember). But it doesn't seem to work as smoothly as I'd hope. I'm always worried that the extra crap in there is going to confuse some future program and it's going to mangle my precious emails after I've deleted the old stuff. And then I worry that the longer I wait, the more chance there is of an old format falling by the wayside and being no longer supported. There's always vi, and in the end that's all that will be really necessary. But in reality these aren't just text files, and I want them to be treated like email. And then everytime I send an email using my webhoster's webmail program... (I use gmail only for mailing lists) How do I get those emails off of the hosting space and into my regular email program? Going with Tracy, I considered using IMAP instead of POP, but I don't like the idea of all my email being in someone else's hands. Maybe if I had the funds for a colocated server or a beyond consumer-grade Internet connection here at home... I wish that emails were kind of like mp3s, i.e. well defined, you can have metadata but only certain kinds, they're portable meaning I can send an mp3 across the Internet and someone else will be able to use it just like I did. I would love to have a directory full of discrete files that I could push around as I please. But as it is I feel safer storing my personal writing in a word processor's file format than in email, and email is supposed to be a well-defined standard by now. I'm probably being unreasonable. -todd -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
