[pmmail-list] Leaving PMMail for Thunderbird

[Patrick R. Sklenar]

I've just completed a migration (last week) from PMMail 2000 to Pocomail which also appears to be under active development.  I'm also a long time user of PMMail - I've got saved emails dating back to early 1997 in my mail archive and my original letter from BoB (Robert Novitskey) with my original $30 registration key for PMMail/2 v1.05 from dated 5 April 1995.  And I had been using the previous beta for a while too (what was that?  0.96 or something like that?).

To migrate the address book - exported PM Mail's book to CSV and imported that into Excel.  Deleted the empty columns, added a new row at the top with the column names and re saved the file.  Imported the CSV into Pocomail and used the column names I added to ensure that I arranged the import correctly (you can tell it to ignore the first row during the import, so you don't end up with an address of "labels" :) ).

To migrate the old messages (Wayne Dunham figured this one out) - for safeties sake, create a copy of your PMMail directory (all subfolders and files).  Bulk rename all .MSG files to .EML files (at the OS level, in your new copy of the PMMail structure)   Create the same (or different if you want to make changes) folder structure within Pocomail (called mailboxes & submailboxes) that you have under PM Mail.  Open an Explorer or "My Computer" window and drill down into your copy of the PMMail folders.  Go into the first folder with saved emails and select all of the newly renamed .EML files and drag them over the appropriate mailbox/submailbox in Pocomail and drop them (personally I did a 'select all' via CNTL-A and then deselected the three folder files while holding the CNTL key).  Select the next mailbox/submailbox in Pocomail, switch to the appropriate directory in the PMMail directory and repeat the select/drag/drop.  Repeat until all desired emails have been copied.

It took over an hour, but I was able to migrate my entire history of emails and my address book.  While the procedure looks complex in writing, it really was very simple.  And ironically enough I think it took longer to clean up and migrate the address book than it did to move the thousands of saved emails from the nearly 100 folders and subfolders I had under PMMAil.  The lack of source code means nothing to me since I'm not a programmer. :)

Count me as an ex-PMMail user.  I'll be dropping from this list in a week or so.

pat----
- pmmail-list - The PMMail Discussion List ---------------------------
To POST to the list, send your message to:
pmmail-list@blueprintsoftwareworks.com

To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message to mdaemon@bmtmicro.com 
with the first line of the message body being...
UNSUBSCRIBE pmmail-list@blueprintsoftwareworks.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------