Todd Walton wrote: > On 8/7/07, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Anybody know how to export/import settings from one Thunderbird >> installation to the next?
I'm doing using rsync between different x86_64 linux computers, omitting prefs.js but syncying everything else under the default. I realize this will probably cause grief when versions and extensions get out of whack (it has really screwed up my mimetypes at least once). It's also not very efficient because of the way Thunderbird seems to touch every file and directory and the way the mail is stored in single large files for each folder. I also don't want to be running my own IMAP server (don't want to have to be dependent on network connectivity from my laptop, e.g.). > 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. Agreed. > 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. Agreed, agreed. > 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. I've gone from the JStreet mailer on OS/2 Warp, to the same application on linux (Java !), to Syphleed on linux (after a short detour with Evolution), and now to T-bird, and have seen problems with date and time zone format differences, balking on extra headers, differing treatment of attachments, and other problems causing causing errors (or leaving the body of messages blank) when reading/importing old mail. > I'm probably being unreasonable. No. But the mbox/t-bird combination seems to me to be the safest and most widely used multi-platform solution now available. Sed could probably strip out all the T-bird specific headers pretty easily, if needed. I do worry how emails with "detached" attachments would work when importing to other email clients, however. David Looney -- In video, veritas. -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
