PMM_Tbird & pmmab_CSV

MIGRATION SCRIPTS FOR MOVING FROM PMMAIL TO THUNDERBIRD This package contains two Rexx scripts for the use of PMMail users who wish to move their mail to Thunderbird (the e-mail offshoot from the Mozilla project). One script copies your PMMail mail to the format used by Thunderbird, and the other converts your address books. None of the PMMail files are altered or destroyed; you can delete those files after you're convinced that you really wanted to switch to Thunderbird, but meanwhile the files are there in case you change your mind and switch back. The migration isn't completely automatic - for example, signatures aren't migrated - but it takes you to the point where you can finish the job manually. You have my permission to use these scripts as the starting point for a more ambitious project that automates everything. I don't intend to take this project any further myself, because once the mail is migrated I don't need to do the job again. AUTHOR INFORMATION Author: Peter Moylan e-mail: peter@ozebelg.org web: http://www.pmoylan.org (There is more useful software at my web site.) DISCLAIMER These scripts worked for me. I hope they work for you, but I don't guarantee it. Different software versions, different installation options, or different personal settings could invalidate the assumptions I made. You might find that you have to modify the Rexx code in order to handle your setup. (That's why I did the job in Rexx.) Make sure, in any case, that you back up your copies of both PMMail and Thunderbird before starting. You will not be happy if you lose your mail. My liability in case something goes wrong is limited to what you paid me for this software; i.e. nothing. BEFORE YOU START When copying the mail you will have to know the name of the PMMAIL directory (the directory that contains PMMAIL.EXE). Make a note of it now. While you're there, go to the SOUTHSDE\TOOLS directory, find the files called ADDR.DB and BOOKS.DB, and copy those two files to the directory that contains the two scripts you are going to use. Most importantly, check that you will have enough disk space to hold the new copy of all your mail. Using any suitable file manager, see how much disk space is used by the PMMAIL directory and its subdirectories. (You might be surprised at how big the answer is. I know I was.) Then find - probably in CONFIG.SYS - the specification of the environment variable MOZILLA_HOME. That tells you the drive where the migrated mail is going to go, and you need about as much free space on that drive as is taken up by the PMMAIL directories. If you don't have enough free space, you'll probably have to pick another MOZILLA_HOME, and then reboot and make sure that the Mozilla programs are working properly in the new home. Get this correct before starting the migration. CREATING A DUMMY THUNDERBIRD ACCOUNT The migration scripts are not able to create a Thunderbird account (I couldn't fully decode the format of some of the files), so you'll have to do that manually. Start Thunderbird, and from the File menu select New->Account. Follow the prompts to create a new e-mail account that uses POP. This is going to be a throwaway account that you will probably delete after doing the migration, so the account details (server name, username, etc.) can be given imaginary names. Make a note of the account name (specified at the final step), and the imaginary POP server name, because one of these (depending on which version of Thunderbird you're using) will identify the directory that you'll have to use during the migration. Leave Thunderbird running for the next step. MIGRATING THE ADDRESS BOOKS This is the easy part. You are going to use the script PMMAB_CSV.CMD from the present package, and the files ADDR.DB and BOOKS.DB from the PMMAIL TOOLS directory. If you've been following the instructions so far, you already have these three files in the same directory. The script can accept two parameters to specify a source and result directory, but it's easiest to run it without parameters, in which case it will assume the current directory. Run that script. It will create several *.CSV files, one for each of your address books. Now go to Thunderbird, and on the Tools menu choose the Import option. Follow the "Next" options until you get to a file selection menu. Using this, choose the first of your *.CSV files. (You might have to change the "Restrict files to" option to specify that you're looking for CSV files.) Next you will come to a window listing a lot of address book fields. Leave all the options unchanged, and select the OK button. Finish the operation. To check that it worked, open the address book and confirm that the desired entries have indeed been imported. Then repeat that operation for all of your *.CSV files. COPYING ALL THE OLD MAIL This next part will be very slow, because there will probably be many thousands of files to copy. You might find that it's easiest to do this run overnight. In my case, I had so much mail that I had to leave it running for almost 24 hours. I have since updated the script to let you migrate only a subset of the PMMail accounts, so that you can do the migration a little bit at a time, but the big accounts are still going to take a long time. Run the script PMM_TBIRD. It will ask you for two directory names, one for your PMMAIL directory and one for a temporary directory to hold the migrated mail. The default for the temporary directory is a subdirectory 'TempDir' within the Thunderbird directory structure, and this will probably already be suitable without your having to alter it. The PMMAIL directory, on the other hand, will probably have to be entered manually, because I can't guess where you have PMMail installed. Depending on how much mail you have, this script could take a very long time to run. Just let it run overnight, or in the background while you're working on other things. You can safely use Thunderbird while this is happening. You can probably also use PMMAIL, although there's a risk of a file conflict if you're accessing a file that the script is also trying to access. There's also the risk of some mail not being migrated because PMMAIL fetched it after the migration script had finished dealing with that Inbox. [Many hours later] When the script has finished running, close Thunderbird. You now have to manually move some files, and you have to do it while Thunderbird is NOT running. Go to your Thunderbird Mail directory. If you're not sure where it is, you can find the path from the MOZILLA_HOME variable which is probably in CONFIG.SYS. As an indication of what the directory path should look like, the directory name in my case is G:\MozProfiles\Thunderbird\Profiles\ioomzt8y.default\Mail In that directory you will have one subdirectory per POP mail account, and one of those accounts should be the dummy account that you created for the purpose of this migration. Open that subdirectory. In my case the new account has the name "h", which is the dummy account name I chose for ease of typing. The temporary directory used by the migration script - which, if you accepted the default, should also be a subdirectory of the Thunderbird mail directory - should also contain some files and some further subdirectories, where the file names all correspond to PMMAIL account names (say xyz), and the subdirectory names are all of the form xyz.sbd. Select those files and sbd subdirectories, and move them all into the "h" directory, or whatever name you chose for the dummy account. Cross-check. For each PMMAIL account you should be moving two things: one zero-sized file xyz, and one directory xyz.sbd, where xyz is the account name in PMMAIL. [Why didn't the migration script put them into the right directory in the first place? Answer: I had trouble decoding some details of the Thunderbird configuration files. Also, I didn't want Thunderbird to notice those new files until the migration script had finished running.] Now start Thunderbird again. You should see a collection of new folders containing the migrated mail. The mail isn't necessarily in the folders you really wanted it in, but from here on you can move mail around using Thunderbird itself, until it's arranged to your satisfaction. You will notice that Thunderbird does some extra initialisation work on each new folder when you first open it. For folders containing lots of mail, expect a time delay. One trap to watch out for: I found that when I dragged a folder from one Thunderbird account to another it did a copy rather than a move, which can be confusing if you then forget to delete the original. Also, it seems that Thunderbird can hang if you get impatient and try to start another operation before the move is finished. I lost several folders of mail before I realised that I had to pause between the 'move folder' operations. Remember that you still have another copy of all that mail in the PMMAIL directories. If you're certain that you're not going to go back to PMMAIL, you can delete the originals. If you're a bit more cautious, but still want to save disk space, you can use a zip utility to save all the old mail in a single archive. Remember, too, that you still have a (possibly empty) temporary directory, which for neatness you should delete. In addition, you have a new dummy Thunderbird account that you will probably want to delete after you have moved its contents to 'real' mail accounts. I've found that Thunderbird does not physically delete the directories when an account is deleted, so you'll have to manually delete all the obsolete files. (The Thunderbird designers seem to have adopted the Microsoft approach of letting obsolete files accumulate, and buying a new computer once the disk is full, but OS/2 users typically don't work with such enormous disks.)