Importing Mail

I’ve been using MailSteward and just exported from that program into mbox files.
I tried to import those mbox files into EF and I just get one icon and all the mail is just stuck in this icon. It is a bunch of junk because it includes the long headers and messages all in one text type file.

Is this what it is suppose to look like??

There are also options to to export into:
tab-delimited file
SQL file
MailSteward Data Base File

What do you suggest?

No, it should appear as a mailbox in the source list, and when you click on the mailbox it should show a list of messages, like in Mail. Could you send me one of your mbox files via e-mail so that I can see why it isn’t being imported properly?

You should export in mbox format.

After looking at the file that you sent, I see that the problem is that MailSteward did not export a valid mbox file. The second line of each message is supposed to be the start of the message headers, but instead it’s a number. Also, there are lines within the messages that begin with “From ” but which are not escaped. Mailsmith is also unable to import the file. I will see if I can adapt EagleFiler to import the file anyway, but really this is a problem that should be solved in MailSteward.

Thank YOU
Thank you for working so fast to make my mail import.
It works like a charm now.
Kim

not searching email addresses
I’ve imported my mail properly now.

I’m searching for the last name of a customer.
EF is only showing them if they have the name in the content of the email.

It is not bringing up emails from that person, eg in the ‘from’ column it shows their last name but EF is not pulling those up.
I am searching the entire library.
Am I missing something or is this impossible?

Also, I need to be able to put someone’s email address in the search to find all of their emails. Am I missing something here too.

Thank you Michael.
Kim

Anywhere searches use an index. Is it possible that EagleFiler is still building the index for the mailbox? That is, do you see anything going on in the Activity Viewer window?

That should work with an Anywhere search once the messages are indexed. If you set it to search the From or To/Cc, it will work even without the index.

EagleFiler 1.1.6 includes some enhancements so that it should be able to read the mbox files that MailSteward generates.

I am still not getting MailSteward exported mbox files. I am using the latest version of MS (7.7.7 at the time of this posting), and EagleFiler 1.2.2. The file imports as described above, a single text file with a special icon (taken from the Finder icon it appears). I have Emailchemy on my system, and I can use that to clean the mbox file a bit (basically just importing into Emailchemy as mbox and then exporting as mbox). Unfortunately, it has problems with MailSteward’s format as well, and produces an mbox file with a double email count, with the doubled emails simply being blank. This imports into EF as you would expect, as a mail folder with blank doubles. After deleting the doubles, I’m good to go. So I have a work-around, but just thought you should know there are still issues.

Granted, none of this is your fault. :slight_smile:

If you e-mail me one of your “mbox” files I’ll see if I can get EagleFiler to handle them better.

Okay, it looks like I am going to have to qualify my statement a bit. I created a selection of non-personal emails to provide as an example, and those imported just fine. These particular emails have a much less tortured history than the ones I had problems with. Those date back over a decade, and have gone through so many email application’s import and export that they are probably a wild mess. I’ll try to create a condition that doesn’t work, but for the moment it looks like Mail.app > MailSteward > EagleFiler is in fact working just fine.

Pine > Elm > Gnome Evolution > kMail > Mozilla Mail > Mail.app > Thunderbird > Mail.app > Mulberry > Thunderbird > Mail.app > Gmail > Mail.app > MailSteward > EagleFiler

–on the other hand. Ha. Can you tell I don’t really like Mail, but really want to? Yeah.

I found a work-around for this problem, if anyone else comes across it. If you do have some MailSteward records that do not import directly into EagleFiler, the best way to get them in is to export the problematic records from MailSteward to the mbox format, and then import them into Mail.app. Now you might notice that you have double the count that you should. This is due to MailSteward’s fault. Fortunately, the duplicates will all be blank, and as far as I can tell, the non-blank ones are complete emails with no problems in them. The headers are formed correctly with the original dates, and attachments are present.

Since the duplicates are blank, you can easily sort them all by clicking on the From column in Mail. This column should never be blank, so it is safer than searching by Subject when can be blank in a valid email. This will lump all of the bad emails together, which can be deleted enmasse. Now that you have everything in Mail.app, getting the emails to EagleFiler should be a simple process. Alternatively, you could do the clean-up just as easily in EagleFiler, but since EF has to index everything during import, it is probably a better idea to get the mail folder as clean as possible before importing.

This is all the fault of MailSteward. Who knows why a program dedicated to archiving email would generate bad email formats when exporting, but that is the way it is, and that is one reason why I’m consider EF for all of my long-term email archival in the future.