[clue-talk] moving Mozilla email

[dperkins at techangle.com]

> 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.

The new computer already has Inbox, Sent, etc.  I need to merge mail from
the old system with the new one.  Renaming the mail folders on the old
machine seemed to be the easiest way to do this.  I hadn't considered
Local Folders.

What are the msf files?  I thought they might be some sort of index file,
but that doesn't appear to be the case.

> 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
> --

That's exactly it.  The folders looked empty.  This might be all I need to
do now.  I'll try it tonight.  Thanks.