October 07, 2004

Curious George: Computer help. I need to transfer emails from Eudora on a PC to a Mac. I have no clue how to do this. Please hope me!

The emails don't need to be saved as useable email - saving them as text files would be fine. There are too many to just forward to myself and download onto the new system. Is it just question of finding the files on the hard drive and copying them to CD?

posted by Sooooz 20 years ago
  • See here, for a start. As I recall (it's been years since I did this), yes, it's just a matter of moving the files over. I used to carry a (small) hard drive with all my files around and plug it into multiple Macs and one PC with Eudora, all configured to read/write from the drive. I never had any file format problems. YMMV, etc. Good luck!
  • Though I've never used Eudora, I've done e-mail migrations across a wide variety of systems. Ordinarily you should expect to export from Eudora/PC to a so-called mailbox file and import it in Eudora/Mac (or any other mail reader that groks the mbox format). Unfortunately, Eudora appears to have trouble with the exporting function. See this page for some info. On preview: I explicitly disrecommend the method in mwhybark's link. Converting to a Word document and then back to text will destroy the structure of all but the most trivial emails. For instance, I don't think it will handle MIME correctly, nor do I believe it will preserve character-encoding.
  • From the horse's mouth at Eudora. I can't emphasize the CR/LF issues strongly enough. You will hose yourself big time and your files will be unreadable if you don't take care of them! The Eudora people advise that you use FTP to move the files to avoid the CR/LF issues. If you want a Mac FTP client with a pretty front end, I recommend Fugu, which is free and with which I have had good success. I haven't used it for exactly this application, but I have used it to move files to Windows and Unix boxes, and it keeps me away from the command line. On preview: OMG, do NOT turn it into a Word doc!!!! Talk about hosing yourself!!!!
  • Hi, Sooooz! In Eudora 6 I'm able to open a mailbox, hit "select all" and then "save as" a text file. Eudora will "guess paragraphs" and "include headers" if you wish. I end up with one large file containing all message bodies. Simpler than the FTP with the MBX and the CRLF and the muh-hye glayven, but this method doesn't save each message as individual files. However, you can search that final text file for whatever keyword you're looking for.
  • But I like the muh-hye glayven!
  • Ha! You've been re-dorkulated!
  • Heh, missed the part about "don't need them as usable emails". Just save the MBOX files onto CD. If you've got BBEdit or another decent text editor on your Mac, it'll solve the CR/LF problem when you open the files.
  • whoops, my bad. I didn't look closely enough at the instructions (Googling this yielded scads of results, I just grabbed the first one that appeared to be a real support doc).
  • If you need a mailing address, e-mail's in the profile. Calatravas and tank-style tourbillons are preferred.
  • Whoa! Wrong thread!