>I'm a former user of Emailer and I recently purchased Powermail. I am >very happy with it, on the whole. I use an iMac DV Special Edition, 400 >mhz, System 9.2.2, 128 Mb RAM. > >I managed to import several thousand of my Emailer messages into >Powermail, using the database import feature, "Migration from Claris >Emailer (messages and addresses)". > >This took a LOOOONG time, spread over several nights. It was very messy, >because each morning the job was unfinished, and I had to go through my >Emailer message folders and manually delete the messages that had already >gone to Powermail, so that they wouldn't be imported a second time. > >I still have several thousand messages in Emailer that I need to import >to Powermail. I am looking for a better way to do this.
I don't want to sound flippant, but why do you want to import the messages? Both Emailer and PowerMail will be slowed down considerably by a large message database. (The difference with Emailer is astonishing. When I rebuilt my database & went from 12 MB to <2MB, Emailer launched essentially instantly--<1 sec, vs 6-8 secs before, on a 800 mHz G4 flatpanel iMac with 512 MB RAM, with 25 MB assigned to Emailer. The difference could be even more dramatic for you.) A large database is more susceptible to corruption and other problems, as well. (One thing to remember is that deleting messages in Emailer does not remove them from the database. That can be done only with a database rebuild--see below.) You could easily lose all your email. Instead of migrating these messages, I'd suggest that you archive most of them. Then, you only need to migrate the ones you really need to access regularly. I'd also recommend backing up the archived messages off your HD. (You should be backing up data, anyway, especially if you're using the Mac for business.) A Zip drive is relatively cheap, as are USB floppy drives. Today's FireWire CD-RW drives are also relatively cheap and very fast, though you might not be able to use the maximum speeds. There are three ways to do this that I can think of right now. - Save them as text files. Within Emailer, open a folder you want to archive, select the messages to archive, then choose "Save messages as text ..." in the AppleScript menu (looks like a scroll, between the Window and Help menus). Navigate to the target folder and click on "Choose." You can set up file folders for each folder in Emailer or use any scheme that makes sense for you. Then, you can delete the messages in Emailer. Follow this up with a database rebuild to reduce the size of the Emailer database. A note: Emailer will save the text files with the subject of the message. If there are more than one message with the same subject (or at least the same first 31 characters), it will save them with unique filenames like "Subject 1," "Subject 2," etc. - Use an archiving program like John Carlson's eMessage Archiver. It works equally well with Emailer 2 and PowerMail. See: http://homepage.mac.com/ThinkAgain/Mac/eMA/ eMA is a FileMaker Pro database, but you can get a "Solution" application to run it if you don't have FMP. Be sure to read John's note about the eMA Script Librarian: you will probably need the special classic version. An advantage to using eMA is that it's a lot easier to sort and search messages by date, subject, source, even the folder where they were in Emailer. eMA can be set to move archived messages to Emailer's trash or to leave them alone. (I'd suggest leaving them alone at first.) eMA is easy to use and John has a support elist like this one. - As a last resort, use Emailer itself as the archive. IOW, don't migrate the messages--leave them where they are and only use Emailer when you need to get to an old message. That's not very satisfactory, for a lot of reasons (e.g., it takes up a lot of HD space), but it would work. You might even be able to run eMailer off of a Zip disk, as long as you leave the necessary files in the System Folder. >One thing I should mention. All my Claris Emailer files are on a >Powerbook 1400 which is connected to the iMac by Ethernet. The Emailer's >Mail Database is corrupted, so that I can't copy it as a file, or move it >or do anything to it. But I can launch the Emailer program and see all >the messages. That is very strange. If it were that corrupted, Emailer should have problems with it. Have you tried a database rebuilt under Emailer? To do this, launch Emailer while holding down the option key. You will get a box asking if you want to rebuild the database, with two options. The first is a "typical rebuild, " the second an "advanced rebuild." If you have been having problems, you might want to go on and use the advanced rebuild, though it will take longer. The rebuild will not do anything to your existing database or index except put "OLD" at the end of the filename. You can go back to using them by deleting the new database and index files (or at least moving them out of the Mail folder) and removing the "OLD" from the filenames of the original database and index files. >I have noticed some instructions for doing this a faster way that involve >using Applescript. The instructions call for using scripts. I have >never used this feature before. And can't figure out how to use it, >either. (I am not a computer person. ) Emailer's scripts are accessed through the AppleScript menu. It has an icon, rather than a word--it looks like a scroll of paper, between the Window and Help menus. I'm using Emailer right now, in fact, so I can see it. If you don't have the Save Messages as Text script, let me know and I'll send it to you. FWIW, Emailer should work fine under OS X's Classic mode, as well. The major reason to go to PowerMail would be to gain its added features. (Unfortunately, PowerMail lacks a script to save multiple messages as text and I haven't been able to find one, yet.) The good part of going to PowerMail is that you won't have much of a learning curve, as it is very much like Emailer to use. My major gripe (and it's pretty minor) with PowerMail is that it's a pain to edit a waiting message in the out box-it has to be changed to a draft, then saved, then changed back to waiting. The "Send waiting messages" command is very handy, though--it's faster than Emailer's Connect dialog. George Slusher/Eugene, OR [EMAIL PROTECTED]
