Converting To Mbox

from Microsoft Outlook

You can convert from Microsoft's proprietary formats (PST as used by Outlook XP or dbx as used by Outlook Express etc.) to mbox using Dbxconv from http://people.freenet.de/ukrebs/dbxconv.html (remember to rename the resulting mbx files as mbox) or by using Mozilla for Win32(http://mozilla.org/), but you may find that you end up with semi-colons delimiting multiple recipients in the headers, if the original message involved non-SMTP addresses. In this case you'll either need some kind of Perl script to munge the mbox headers before importing into Zoe, or you may be better off Importing Mail via IMAP if your Exchange server supports that.

using Mozilla to convert mail

  1. launch mozilla [1]
  2. fire up the mail program (Window -> Mail & Newsgroups).
  3. Tools -> Import
  4. check mail , hit Next
  5. select where to import from, then Next
  6. you should see Mozilla's progress importing, after it's done, click Finish
  7. rename the mbox files to end with mbox instead of the names that mozilla gave to them(.mbx or no extension at all).
Note: You may find that Mozilla save your mail files under C:\Documents and Settings\[Log-in Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\mail\
reference: [Zoe-general]

Apple OSX Mail

Apple has changed the format it uses for mail between 10.3 and 10.4.
The following utility may be helpful if you need to get the mail BACK into a traditional mbox format so you can import it into Zoe. [2] From the website: "In Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", the default message format for Mail messages changed from the Apple custom mbox-package format to the new emlx format (where messages are stored in individual files for Spotlight indexing). However, if you need to recover from a hard drive crash, it's almost impossible to recover your mail messages easily since Mail won't import emlx files and you can't add them to your mailboxes any other way."

Converting Opera M2 email

If you already have [python] installed (or don't mind installing it yourself), try [MBS2MBX]. It bills itself as "a conversion tool that reads e-mails from Opera's e-mail client M2 and saves them as mbox files."

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