I want...

Feb. 7th, 2002 05:50 pm
cellio: (avatar)
[personal profile] cellio
...a tool that will let me banish Outlook from my desktop once and for all.

I'm using Outlook at work through historical happenstance, even though I know it's hell-spawn and I've never actually liked it. I would like to switch to pine, a mailer that I know, like, and trust not to inflict virii and gratuitous HTML and similar crap upon me. The problem is that I have 10 months' worth of saved mail, in folders, that is important. I want to be able to move that mail to pine format. This means converting from whatever internal format Microsoft is using to plain text (no HTML markup), ideally in nicely-formatted lines under 80 characters, and pine-ifying it (inserting the characters that separate messages). Quoted text still needs to look like quoted text, even if the message used indentation rather than explicit demarcation. I want to preserve the existing sets of folders automagically; I'm willing to export one folder at a time and copy the resulting file to the right place in the pine directory structure, but I'm not willing to dump everything in one huge file and sort it out again.

I'm also not really willing to forward all my saved mail to myself, partly because of the one-huge-pile problem and partly because I want From lines to be meaningful. (The latter could possibly be fixed by a different script that would rewrite the resulting files.) Mostly, though, because it would be a tedious manual process.

I fear, though, that I'm going to be stuck with Outlook forever.
From: [identity profile] prejlog.livejournal.com
You're wlcome. And to respond to the Eudora vs Pien question: I've used both, and liek both. I'm using Eudora now 'cause i want to work off line (only one phone line for internet & voice), but pine is cool too. Eudora's very easy to use, and I seem to remember it was pretyt easy to transition from pine to eudora. Right now I'm using 5.1 on the Mac in free mode, and it's keeping me happy (had been using lite for a while but teh horrible search function was driving me mad. I had to open my Email folders in BBEdit lite and use its grep function whenever I wanted to do a search!) When I get the time/money i'll pay to make the ads go away, but they aren't really obnoxious. (had a friend with netzero... now THAT was obnoxious ads!)

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