Import Via Redirected Messages

summary: This page describes the procedure to import archived email by redirecting them to Zoe.

What does "Redirect" mean?

The nomenclature is not very clear. Eudora calls this "Redirect", PMMail/2 calls it "Bounce" and RFC822 uses the "Resend" tag for such operations.
Your client will re-send the email message selected, but with the original sender, date and other header information intact to a specified email address.

Try redirecting email if attachments are impractical for you:

Some people have reported difficulty Import Via Attachments.
- For some, this is because their clients put a limit on how many attachments are allowed.
- For others it's an issue of their email native formats being incompatible so the attachements are not seen as email messages.
If you run into these problems, one solution that may work for you is to use the "Redirect" feature of your client -- if your client supports that feature!

setup ZOE as your SMTP server in your current email client.
- Note that ZOE's SMTP server runs on port 10025.
- The SMTP server name will probably be localhost, 127.0.0.1 or your own IP address
- Use your ZOE user name and password as SMTP user name and password. For more about your ZOE user name and password see SystemConfiguration/LoginSetup?
Select the mail you want to redirect, choose the redirect (or similar) command, type in your email address, and click the send button. Depending on your mail software, it may be possible to select all of the messages in a single folder to send at once. Your client will then re-send all of the selected email messages with the original header information to Zoe, which files them all away as if they were the original email messages.
- Again depending on your software, if you select multiple messages to send at once, these may be sent as individual messages, or they may all be combined into one large one. In either case, because Zoe indexes the content the individual messages should be easily recoverable.

If your email client does not allow you to specify a five-digit port number, see System Configuration/Config Files or Frequently Asked Questions for info on changing the port used by ZOE's SMTP server.
Backup your entire mail program before starting!:
- If you're sending an entire account with thousands of email messages that have been accumlated over years, then there's a good (bad) chance that some of those messages may have been corrupted over time or were sent with older clients that don't follow the rules. This, along with the fact that you may be sending thousands of email messages in one huge batch, means that there's a not insignificant chance that your mail program could crash (itself and possibly your OS) during the process. Backing up the entire program including settings and accounts is not such a bad idea.

Zoe 0.4.5 and newer will store the redirected messages in today's date rather than the original send date. Apparently this is intended to be a safety feature that prevents mis-parsed messages from being stored in pre-historic times :)
- Zoe 0.4.9 added the time.difference option to the System Configuration/Configuration Editor that can be used to set the threshold for determining when the difference between the current date and the sent date is so large that the message should be stored in the current rather than the sent date. Setting this value to a huge number of days could effectively shut off the feature desribed in the above point.
The last version that this was known to work correctly in was version 0.2.
- Of course, as mentioned above, using changing time.difference in the System Configuration/Configuration Editor can be used as a work around in 0.4.9 and newer.
Test this feature out before attempting a major import.