[clue-talk] moving Mozilla email

[Jed S. Baer]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 08:29:15 -0700 (MST)
dperkins at techangle.com wrote:

> Has anyone tried moving Mozilla's email files from one computer to
> another?  One complication is that I need to do this without destroying
> messages on the second computer.  I tried copying a few files, e.g.,
> Sent and Sent.msf, but this only worked for one set of files.

I've done this several times for one friend of mine, going back to
Netscape 3.

Mozilla mail folders are just Mbox files.

Find the "Local Folders" directory, and copy the Inbox, etc. files to
there.

I don't know quite what you meant by "one set of files". Do you mean you
have multiple mail folders, each with their own set of Inbox, Sent, etc.
mailbox files? In that case, I rename them. For example, in folder1, Inbox
becomes something like f1Inbox under "Local Folders" on the destination
machine. Again, don't copy the MSF files.

In any case, renaming the files will avoid collisions with other Mbox
files.

What do you mean by "didnt' work" for your other files? Did you not see
those mail folders in Mozilla after copying them over? Or was it that the
folders were there, but appeared to be empty?

If it's the latter case, you will need to remove the X-Mozilla status
headers from the messages. You can do this by using a sed script.

  sed -e '/^X-Mozilla-Status/d' oldfilename > newfilename

Then move newfilename to the new computer under the "Local Folders"
directory. Note, however, that this will remove "marked as deleted"
information. I advise compacting the folder first.

jed
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