Re: Thunderbird to Emacs migration

[David Rogoff <david@therogoffs.com>]

On 2010-03-12 15:15:26 -0800, Giorgos Keramidas said:

> On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:08:37 -0600, John Bokma <john@castleamber.com> wrote:
>> I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird for many years. For the past
>> year or so I've been using Emacs more and more (first as editor, now
>> also to access Usenet), and I am wondering how easy migrating from
>> Thunderbird to Emacs would be and which Emacs email solution would be
>> the best.
> 
>> Questions:
>> 
>> - which package(s) do you recommend for reading/writing email (I have
>> several accounts, most POP3, and one IMAP. Some POP3 accounts use
>> SSL/TLS with CRAM)
>> 
>> - is it possible to work directly with the email files Thunderbird
>> creates, or do I have to convert them?
> 
> Gnus is the mail reader I use.  I am still learning how to use it
> effectively after almost two years, but it is a very nice program with
> literally hundreds of options.  I've even written some Lisp code to
> extend it and tweak its behavior in an automated manner.
> 
> Gnus should be able to pull your messages from multiple IMAP and POP3
> accounts, but see below before you pull everything into Gnus.

vm is much easier to use for mail than gnus.  gnus is great as a (text) 
Usenet newsreader, but it just wasn't designed as a mail program and 
the attempts to make it so have all seemed pretty crazy to me.  I gave 
it a try for a while but it just required the user to do things the way 
gnus wanted and not what made sense as a mail program.  I liked using 
vm and gnus together.  Any Usenet articles I wanted to save I could 
have gnus save into the folders I used for vm and read them later in vm.

vm works great and is compatible with TB's mail folders since they both 
use (well, vm can also use other formats too) good old rfc822 / mbox 
text files.  TB adds index files to speed up access, which I don't 
think vm will use.  Here's some more detail: 
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/thunderbird-email-database.htm

My info is probably a couple of years out of date (my company's IT dept 
only supported Outlook/exchange), so there may be some recent changes, 
but I went back and forth between TB (Netscape mail before that) and vm 
with little problem for a few years.

However, as much as I'm an emacs advocate (been using it virtually 
every day for 22 years) and an advocate of plain text files (just 
started using org-mode a lot), I don't know if I'd go back to it for 
mail. There's so much HTML, RTF, and other enhanced mail messages I 
have to deal with every day that I've given in.

Try just running M-x vm-visit-folder and point to one of your TB mail 
files. It should just load it and you can see how you like reading 
messages in vm without having to deal with all the setup for 
downloading messages.

 David