Linux and fonts and Firefox and human-factors design

[Paul Lussier]

kclark at elbrysnetworks.com (Kevin D. Clark) writes:

> Paul Lussier writes:
>
>> I use fetchmail, it speaks pop and IMAP.  My messages are stored in
>> text files.  I can easily move my messages to any computer and client
>> I want with tar and scp.
>
> Please tell us how you'd use tar and scp to copy your messages over to
> a machine that uses (for example) the Eudora mailer.  Please give us
> specific details.


You're missing the point.  The previous poster claimed:

Fred <puissante at lrc.puissante.com> writes:

> One of the reasons I exclusively use the IMAP protocol for email is the fact
> I can migrate my mailbox folder layouts to *any* IMAP client on different
> computers. With POP, you're kinda stuck with the computer and client you
> initially use.

The underlying statement here is that IMAP as a protocol protects you
from being trapped into a certain client.  The assertion is that IMAP
is better than POP because you can get the same view of your e-mail
from multiple clients.  My assertion is that that is irrelevant,
people (on average) don't tend to use vastly differing clients from
one location to another, and they tend to stick with the same clients
for years.  When they do change to a new client, it really isn't all
that different from the previous client, and will tend to have some
means of importing the old clients format.

Obviously there are exceptions, Outlook can't import mail from Gmail.
But someone using Eudora today, isn't likely to suddenly start using
Gnus with an nnml backend, or vice-versa.

And to answer your question, I don't know off the top of my head how
I'd get my mail into Eudora, since a) I've never used Eudora, b) don't
have any current access to a platform that runs Eudora, and c) have no
desire to bother right now.  But knowing that I have over 12 years of
past e-mail from several different companies across at least 3 very
different e-mail clients (pine, exmh, and gnus), I'm fairly certain I
could coerce Eudora into importing my entire archive (especially
since I see that it can import both Outlook Express and Netscape
mail...)

> Continuing this thought-experiment, tell us how, after you'd used
> Eudora for a while, please tell us how you'd import all of your mail
> into Thunderbird.

Simple, Thunderbird mailboxes are already in Unix mbox format, so
there's no need to convert anything.

> --kevin (who runs his own IMAP server, which I have described here
>          many times, and I am currently accessing my mail with two
>          different mailers)

-- 
Seeya,
Paul (who avoids running his own IMAP server and uses ssh and screen instead
      so I can deal with just 1 mail client)