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.

LookOut -> pine

Date: 2002-02-08 01:30 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] figmo.livejournal.com
While trying to help a co-worker move her stuff from Netscape Mail to LookOut on a Wintel box I came across the following tricks for doing the reverse:
  1. Use Netscape's mail reader to convert the files from LookOut format to standard mail format.
  2. Move the folders to a place where you can use pine to read e-mail
  3. Use pine to access your converted folders.

Voila! No digging for funny tools, no problem!

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