Re: Thunderbird to Emacs migration

[Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTreddy@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

[Expanded circulation to gnu.emacs.vm.info]

VM version 8.1.0 has a couple of features in the Change Log that are relevant to the discussion here:

    * Added syncing of message status when visiting a mbox of Thunderbird.
      Not all message flags are interchangeable and the message summary
      file (.msf) of Thunderbird will get removed by VM in order to force
      Thunderbird to rebuild it.  Also VMs folder index will be skipped if
      it is older than the folder in order to update VMs message status flags.

    * Improved text/html displaying by w3m.  Inline images are now extracted
      correctly and they also display now.  Added a generic handler code to
      support also other HTML handlers.

These were contributed by Robert Widhopf-Fenk and Katsumi Yamaoka.  8.1.0 is currently available as a pre-release on the Launchpad development site, https://www.launchpad.net/vm,

I myself use w3m for HTML messages regularly and think it is quite brilliant.  I don't have any experience with the interoperation with Thunderbird.  But I was happy to hear about David's experience in switching between VM and Thunderbird.  The compatibility features added by Robert should make it even easier to interoperate.

Cheers,
Uday Reddy



David Rogoff wrote:
> 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
>