[CLUE-Tech] Migrating from Outlook Express to Thunderbird

[Keith Hellman]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 05:49:55PM -0600, Dan Harris wrote:
> #1  The only way to save an email message to the file system is to click 
> File/Save. They are willing to live with that.  But, once the email is 
> saved the attachments don't get automatically saved with the message.  
> So if you click File/Open Saved Message, there will be no attachment to 
> the message.  Having to save all the attachments manually adds more 
> steps to the procedure that they are not willing to tolerate. 
> 
> #2 Once a file is saved to a local folder, double-clicking on the 
> message will open it with OE.  I was able to go into Tools/File Options 
> and change the File Type association to thunderbird.exe, thinking that 
> double-clicking on the message would open it in T-bird.  But alas, it 
> does not.  It does nothing when double-clicking on the .eml file.
 
Perhaps one solution is to not solve the problem this way.  Could a
dummy email account be set up for each project?  Then users would
simply *forward* Emails instead of saving them to a particular location.

The dummy accounts could be serviced by a simply procmail/python/perl
script that separates out the actual Email text and attachments into
separate files at the appropriate network share/drive location.

Some advantages (if this would work):
- I *really* think that forwarding a message would be faster then saving
  it to a particular location (the latter probably requiring some
  filespace navigation)
- You don't need an MUA to look at the Emails
- It is easy to find all the PDF, or ZIP, or CAD drawings associated
  with the project by simply running find on 
- I suspect you could *still* save the messages as .eml files (if you
  know what these file formats are, simple mail messages with mime
  attachements?) which wouldn't break processes they already have in
  place for scanning the directories (processes==habits).
- MD5 sums could prevent multiple copies of the same files (how do they
  prevent this when 5 people save a project related Email to the same
  location now?  or do they have a .2 FTE 'save-to-the-project-drive' guy
  :^)

If you set Thunderbird to use (in part?) an LDAP address book, you
wouldn't have to make sure people use and remember the correct addresses
for the correct projects.  This would also allow you to send the mail to
a dedicated internal linux server instead of through some type of MS
backend mail system (the mail would just go to
deep_pocket_project at 192.168.32.4).

Just some thoughts.  

-- 
Keith Hellman                             #include <disclaimer.h>
khellman at mcprogramming.com                from disclaimer import standard
public key @ www.mcprogramming.com


"You may find that you spend 5% of your time implementing the threads
and 95% of your time ensuring that you've done the right thing."

-- Marc J. Rochkind, *Advanced Unix Programming*, Second Ed.
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